Transferring Cassettes to Digital

[nerwin]

I was wondering if anyone here at TPF has any experience in transferring cassette tapes to digital for archiving?

I have a few cassette tapes that was originally transferred from a 45 of my grandfather in the Korean war. Also have other things here and there that need to be transferred and saved.

I no longer have a cassette tape deck so I'm looking for a solution that will allow me to transfer decent quality audio from the tape to a digital file like MP3 or Wav.

I was originally thinking about buying a used Sony Walkman on eBay and connecting the headphone jack to my Zoom H1 and transferring them that way but not sure if that's the best idea. You can't really find any high quality NEW cassette players with modern connectivity. There are some but they don't seem to get any positive reviews which is why I said it could be better to use older equipment that were built better and used higher quality components then and not cheap crap now.

Any help would be really appreciative.

 

[kap55]

I have done a lot of this. Best way is to borrow a cassette player (or someone's old boom box) and run a line from headphone output of the cassette device to the line in on your computer. You will need software to capture the audio then you can edit it and export as mp3. I use Adobe software, but have heard very good reports about this software - it's free, open source and will do everything you need.

Audacity

 

[table1349]

Amazon.com: Onkyo TA-RW311 Stereo Cassette Double Deck Tape Deck: Home Audio & Theater

Amazon.com: Technics RS-TR575 - Dual cassette deck - black: Home Audio & Theater

 

[webestang6412 1]

I have done a lot of this. Best way is to borrow a cassette player (or someone's old boom box) and run a line from headphone output of the cassette device to the line in on your computer. You will need software to capture the audio then you can edit it and export as mp3. I use Adobe software, but have heard very good reports about this software - it's free, open source and will do everything you need.

Audacity

I use Audacity for my cassette/LP transfer........ Audacity®

 

[Derrel]

Did this before years ago (2005 era) with a Harmon Kardan cassette deck and amplifier and ran the audio-out to an old Apple PowerBook G3 which had audio-in capability. It worked! Made a bunch of MP3 files from some ancient cassettes.