cassette to pc?newbie

muincav

can anyone help?
Ive been trying to put my old cassette music on to my pc using a cable with 2 rca plugs connected to the phono out of my stereo and 3.5mm jack in to the sound card..rca plugs have 1 red and 1 black but phono out on stereo is 1 red and 1 white..maybe I have wrong cable..but there is no sound getting to the pc.
Ive tried everthing on the sound recorder, line in and all that but still no joy...
any help much appreciated...thanks

mike65

Have you selected the right input in the windows audio properties software?

Oops edit I see you have (or I think so), is there a bypass button on your amp, some amps have one and it needs to be pressed in for playback from tape input.

Mike.

zilog_jones

muincav wrote:

can anyone help?
Ive been trying to put my old cassette music on to my pc using a cable with 2 rca plugs connected to the phono out of my stereo and 3.5mm jack in to the sound card..rca plugs have 1 red and 1 black but phono out on stereo is 1 red and 1 white..maybe I have wrong cable

With phono cables, black = white. It sounds like the right cable alright.
*However*, most typical stereos don't have a phono output - any phono connection they do have would usually be an input, especially if there's only the one pair of phono sockets. Are you sure what you have is an output? Otherwise try using the headphone socket instead.

witnessmenow

Sounds like youve the right cable anyways, is it definatly plugged into the phono out, alot of stereos have aux in and its easy to get them confused? Another option might be using the head phone slot as your source, a normal 3.5 to 3.5 wire should work for that. If you do get it to work the program i use for recording sound is my mp3 my mp3 got here :
http://www.mp3mymp3.com/mp3_my_mp3_recorder.html

Good luck!

EDIT: Seems like i just read the above post and duplicated oh well, i always was a slow typer!

zilog_jones

I'd recommend Audacity for recording, and if you want to make a proper backup without losing quality use FLAC for encoding.
There's lots of info about audio stuff here: http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/

muincav

cheers and thanks for the help-
I think it may only be aux in on the stereo that Im using, so I will try the headphone socket.....
thanks again to all:)

trout

If you have a lot of cassettes to transfer, you might want to look at something like this ... it's a tape drive for your PC, exactly for this purpose ... cost seems reasonable to me.

http://www.firebox.com/product/1700?src_t=sbk&src_id=usbtape

I'm giving serious consideration to buying one of these things ... maybe theres a niche in the market for selling this service ? :cool: ... prolly not, all the copyright implications

good luck

zilog_jones

Looks pretty cheap and crappy TBH. I don't see any advantage in a USB tape deck. It's not like your sound card doesn't have a line-in, and god knows what sort of cheapo junk ADC is in that thing - I'd say the one in your typical modern on-board sound will be of equal, if not far superior quality.

You'd be much better off with a decent separate tape deck from a respected brand like Sony, Pioneer, Technics, Teac, etc. - though really good new ones can cost well over €200! There's always a good few on eBay.