Cassette Converter

Ian Whelan

What are people's views on this:

http://www.aldi.ie/ie/html/offers/special_buys3_18783.htm?WT.mc_id=2011-10-21-11-19

I've never seen one before but I'm interested.

chin_grin

Handy if you have a ream of cassettes that you want converted. But see the thing is the recording quality is going to be the same as that of the cassette. Sh*tty in otherwords.

Wait 25 bob? A tad pricey!

Ian Whelan

Ok. I'll keep that in mind about the recording quality. I do have a lot of cassettes though (from the good old days).

chin_grin

Ian Whelan wrote: »

Ok. I'll keep that in mind about the recording quality. I do have a lot of cassettes though (from the good old days).

If you had something that looked like this (that could attach to the player) you could connect it to the audio input of your pc\laptop and record that way. Note that the recording will have to be done in real time.

You can use a freeware program called audacity to record.

the corpo

if you have a decent hifi tape player, then you're better off investing in a decent sound card and a cable to hook them up.

yes, cassettes can sound terrible, but they can sound even worse on poor quality players.

that said if audio quality isn't a concern then go for it.

pretty sure you'd pick up one of these cheap enough too, look way smarter
http://www.frequencycast.co.uk/plusdeck.html

BostonB

In the past I got a hifi cassette deck and started to convert all my cassettes to digital format. In the end I did about 5% and chucked the rest. Because most of them had degraded past the point of being worth saving.

I think many original cassette had better quality than the original CD's as many CD's were mastered badly. However they've started to re-release CD's that are better mastered than the original CD releases.

So if I were you I'd start finding out which cassettes have a remaster CD version in decent quality, from HiFi sites and forums. Then start hunting for those versions on CD, or online digital.

The other point is time. Its takes forever to convert loads of cassettes. Whats your time worth? Also the public library has lots of CD's and DVD's these day. Might be another source.

In summary cassettes are rarely worth saving.

mp3ireland2

Is it legal to download digitally (from torrents or using jdownloader from rapidhare/megauplad etc.) songs you have in cassette format? Because obviously it would be a lot quicker than converting.. don't want to be giving anyone illegal advice though so find out if it's legal first!

BostonB

No.

dowtchaboy

mp3ireland2 wrote: »

Is it legal to download digitally (from torrents or using jdownloader from rapidhare/megauplad etc.) songs you have in cassette format? Because obviously it would be a lot quicker than converting.. don't want to be giving anyone illegal advice though so find out if it's legal first!

I've spent a lot of time setting up to transcribe my LPs (ya know the round black things) onto CDR - later I just put them into mp3s on hard disk. Total pain in the bum. There so much noise flying about now with a few PCs, WiFi, DECT phones, etc in houses that even with heavy ground leads, foil shielding and waiting till the house was quiet it's still difficult to get a good transcription. And the time! Takes about 3 hours to transcribe an LP/cassette, having to mark the breaks between songs etc. I gave up. It's possibly worth it if you have a cassette recording of a live session or something where you just want to have it in digital form in one long track. Though the quality is just as poor as the original cassette (my god the hiss!), if it's good music you will find you don't care about the hiss, or the crackle off LPs - have some Celtic Folkweave and stuff I could never find in CD form this way and it's dead handy to be able to play them in the car, on iPod and not have to worry about storage, winding slack tapes with a pencil etc.

This unit might be a handy way to do it but you'd need to have a good few cassettes of rare material to make it worthwhile.

As to the legality - umm..... I have 1 cassette and 2 CD's purchased of exactly the same Dire Straits album - that's 3 times I've paid the royalties - making a further copy purely for my own use seems well within "Fair Use" as far as I am concerned.

danjo-xx

I gave up as it take sooo much time it ain't worth it. I had two cassette decks and neither was playing my tapes satisfactorily.

So I found this via amazon and its a little gem, great sound quality but its fairly heavy and plays all my tapes perfectly.



http://www.soundandvision.co.uk/hifi/cd-radio-cassette-players/panasonic-rx-ed50

markjbloggs

Apologies for the off topic, but does anyone know of an equivalent for converting camcorder tapes to DVDs? Old camcorder is dead, and now I need a way of converting all those old Super8's to someting digital.

Sorry again for the off-topic but you guys seem to know what you're talking about.

BostonB

I dunno I haven't had much success with video. I would suggest you get a sample done before paying someone to do all of it. As some of the quality I've seen from paid services was quite poor.

blastman

Re: video to DVD, the easiest way to do it is to get an adaptor for the Super8 tapes that allows you to play them in a regular VCR. It's easy enough to capture it digitally from there (have done it before myself at home, for myself and other people).

wil

The only advantage this might have is if it can be controlled by the pc and let you automate everything.
Otherwise doubt it would be any better than a basic tape player with av leads and pc audio in.
Time and frustration, deterioration of old tapes from age/mould/damp will likely dirty heads resulting poor audio.

Audacity or free version of Stepvoice recorder
http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Transferring_tapes_and_records_to_computer_or_CD

blastman wrote: »

Re: video to DVD, the easiest way to do it is to get an adaptor for the Super8 tapes that allows you to play them in a regular VCR. It's easy enough to capture it digitally from there (have done it before myself at home, for myself and other people).

????
Camcorder, super8, VCR???. There's definitely no adapter that will let you play Super8 in a regular VCR.
Super8 is 8mm cine film from the 60s

markjb is likely talking video-8 or hi-8, even digital-8.
blastman is probably talking vhs-c which can be played in a VHS vcr with an adapter.
None of these formats are playable in the other by any adapter.

Your cheapest bet is to borrow a Hi-8 camcorder to play back and record it on a dvd recorder or a video capture card in a pc.
For super-8 you'd need a film projector.