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Chat Area => General Discussion Area => Topic started by: r1 on 21 June 2013, 12:03:12

Title: recording tapes to cd
Post by: r1 on 21 June 2013, 12:03:12
ive got the day off today and the place to myself so having a me day,thought id clean the garage a bit and then this afternoon catch up on some films[thanks tunnie]
well I found a box with some old tapes and thought id have a listen but then reliased that I  don't have anything to play them on now  :-[
so is there something I can buy to transfer them to cd don't want to spend hundreds to transfer half a dozen tapes but am open to all ideas[apart from throwing away that old 70s rubbish]
thanks
Title: Re: recording tapes to cd
Post by: tunnie on 21 June 2013, 12:15:02
ive got the day off today and the place to myself so having a me day,thought id clean the garage a bit and then this afternoon catch up on some films[thanks tunnie]
well I found a box with some old tapes and thought id have a listen but then reliased that I  don't have anything to play them on now  :-[
so is there something I can buy to transfer them to cd don't want to spend hundreds to transfer half a dozen tapes but am open to all ideas[apart from throwing away that old 70s rubbish]
thanks

No probs  :y

We talking VHS tapes or audio cassettes?
Title: Re: recording tapes to cd
Post by: biggriffin on 21 June 2013, 14:06:59
Ive got a ccr600 in my estate,that has a tape deck,proper car hifi,does radio and them new fangulled cd thingys ;)
Title: Re: recording tapes to cd
Post by: r1 on 21 June 2013, 17:41:17
ah sorry audio as in cassette tapes
Title: Re: recording tapes to cd
Post by: Rog on 21 June 2013, 19:23:16
ah sorry audio as in cassette tapes

Find your nearest branch of FOPP records that is still open and buy the CDs

Problem is that tape quality was never that good in the first place. Even if you found a tape player with an audio output, and then played into a computer, and then burned to CD, the tapes would probably sound crap. Just not worth it. Sorry
Title: Re: recording tapes to cd
Post by: scimmy_man on 21 June 2013, 20:32:38
you can buy a tape to computer recorder from the bay of E
Title: Re: recording tapes to cd
Post by: Figureman52 on 21 June 2013, 21:52:38
Done a few for myself. Couldn't distinguish any difference in quality between the original tapes and the CD's
Title: Re: recording tapes to cd
Post by: Vamps on 21 June 2013, 21:58:07
I thought Cassette tapes and Vinyl were both coming back........ :y :y
Title: Re: recording tapes to cd
Post by: omega3000 on 21 June 2013, 22:17:44
I thought Cassette tapes and Vinyl were both coming back........ :y :y

Whats a CD  :-\ Still using the RadioGram
Title: Re: recording tapes to cd
Post by: Olympia5776 on 22 June 2013, 00:12:07
I bought a tape to PC transfer kit from Lidl recently with the intentions of slowly transfering the many tapes I have to PC/MP3 .
Did two tapes packaged the kit back up and promptly returned it .
The sound quality was abysmal, maybe unique to that player but not worth the effort.
Conversely I've transferred loads of vinyl onto my PC and then sync'd it to MP3 with great results .
Title: Re: recording tapes to cd
Post by: AndyRoid on 22 June 2013, 10:34:25
so is there something I can buy to transfer them to cd
If you can obtain any kind of playback device (eg, tape deck, Walkman, etc), simply connect the output from that to the "Line In" on your PC and use something like Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/) to record the tapes and save them as WAV files and then burn to CD.
Title: Re: recording tapes to cd
Post by: SIR Philbutt on 22 June 2013, 12:44:56
I thought of doing this once with the tapes I made using the pause button method.

Realised that could get compilation cd's (cheap or borrowed) and also download free when available on peer2peer everything I needed in the best audio quality as poss

About 10 tapes now done (bit by bit over the last 6 months) for about £30 in all. About 4 to go but I think I already have about 50% of them

HTH
P

edit - having a ccr helps so i know whats on the tapes
Title: Re: recording tapes to cd
Post by: dbug on 22 June 2013, 16:03:01
so is there something I can buy to transfer them to cd
If you can obtain any kind of playback device (eg, tape deck, Walkman, etc), simply connect the output from that to the "Line In" on your PC and use something like Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/) to record the tapes and save them as WAV files and then burn to CD.

Yep Audacity is great software - will remove all tape "hiss". 
Title: Re: recording tapes to cd
Post by: r1 on 18 July 2013, 21:27:29
well this has taken a back seat until today when I visted aldi and say a cassette type machine that just plugs into your computer. just hopes it works better than the lidle one that was tried before,but if it isn't I have 60 days to return it[and you can convert a lot of tapes in 60 days so could be like free softwear  ;D ;D]
Title: Re: recording tapes to cd
Post by: Kevin Wood on 18 July 2013, 23:42:57
I thought Cassette tapes and Vinyl were both coming back........ :y :y

Vinyl never really went away among Hi-Fi enthusiasts. Cassettes did. Let's hope they never come back. ;)

You get the odd enthusiast into Reel to Reel tape, but there's little point other than nostalgia, IMHO, when you can store as much music as you can eat, in perfect quality, on a hard drive.
Title: Re: recording tapes to cd
Post by: cleggy on 19 July 2013, 06:51:10
It really depends if the tapes contain rare and un replaceable music, otherwise it's probably cheaper to get the tracks you want via download or compilation CD's.  Far better sound quality mind you I still play all my vinyl albums and I like the sleeve notes that accompany CD's, download seems a bit clinical for me with no writer, producer musician details etc. :y :y
I had some irreplaceable stuff on mini disk, backing tracks, unreleased tracks, alternative versions and some just acappella, bugger of a job transferring them to ITunes and the onto the IPod. Then I lost the some ITunes in a system upgrade despite having a backup, still got them on the IPod and mini disk :y
Title: Re: recording tapes to cd
Post by: zirk on 19 July 2013, 13:16:09
A few months back an friend of mine wanted to restore some Cassette Tapes of his Rock Bands recordings from the 80's, he had already given the tapes to so called Digital Remastering expert who made a complete dogs dinner out of it, the CD's sounded lifeless.

Ive still got some gear kicking around in the cupboard which I dont use any more, so I decided to have a bash from the original Cassettes. A Teac C2 Reference Cassette Deck, fed into a slight boost from DBX subharmonic synthesizer (regenerates the Bass and adds it at one octave below) and then fed to a DBX 3 Band Dynamic Range Expander (splits the Low, Mid and High and independently dynamically expands each section before mixing back together), no changes to the EQ, dumped the result into a DAT Audio and PCM Video Recorder, Job done.

We were both amazed at the quality of the results, zero tape hiss, good heavy clean Bass and very dynamic Mid and Vocals and bright crystal clear top end.

He was well pleased, and all done using active analogue equipment, not a hint of digital trickery anywhere, so theres still life in the older gear today.  :y :y