Transferring tapes to hard drive

Woden

Uncle is interested in transferring tapes onto his hdd via a sony hi-fi unit (sorry can't be more specific on the unit), has anyone ever attempted this, if so is specific software required? or hardware for example a preamp or something? the hi-fi does have the ability to link to the p.c but i don't know if this is for listening to music via the hi-fi speakers or for data transfer to the p.c

thanks

Data

Korg

If your hifi has left/right line out rca jacks you could connect it to the line in jack on your soundcard using this kind of cable. Grab any package that'll sample from the line-in on your pc (soundforge, cooledit ... ), press play on your tape, hit record in soundforge & away you go. If you sample at 44khz stereo you'll end up with around 500meg of wav per side of 90min tape, fun if you want to chop it up into individual tracks. You'll probably get away with 22khz sampling, tapes aren't so great with frequencies above the 10~11khz limit that sampling at 22khz imposes.
You'll probably wanna make mp3's out of all the tracks as well, try out a few encoders as the quality varies between the encoders, they've particular difficulty with all the high frequency noise that tapes produce. Lame is one of the best encoders out there, xing is awful.
It's a resonably manual procedure tho, i hope your uncle doesn't have many tapes, or has his own pc.

Woden

hmm hopefully that will make some sense to him, yeah hes got his own pc, if he gets the files onto the p.c i can probably help him chop them up and i presume he wants to encode them to mp3 as he wants to burn them onto cd then. cheers

Korg

If your hifi has left/right line out rca jacks you could connect it to the line in jack on your soundcard using this kind of cable. Grab any package that'll sample from the line-in on your pc (soundforge, cooledit ... ), press play on your tape, hit record in soundforge & away you go. If you sample at 44khz stereo you'll end up with around 500meg of wav per side of 90min tape, fun if you want to chop it up into individual tracks. You'll probably get away with 22khz sampling, tapes aren't so great with frequencies above the 10~11khz limit that sampling at 22khz imposes.
You'll probably wanna make mp3's out of all the tracks as well, try out a few encoders as the quality varies between the encoders, they've particular difficulty with all the high frequency noise that tapes produce. Lame is one of the best encoders out there, xing is awful.
It's a resonably manual procedure tho, i hope your uncle doesn't have many tapes, or has his own pc.

Woden

would this be of any use

www.maplin.co.uk

>sound and vision>stereo phono preamplifier

(in far right hand column)

Korg

Nah, you don't need the preamp. That's used for turntables, the output from a turntable is significantly lower & needs to be boosted before it can be plugged into a line-in on a stereo. The line out from your stereo will give the same level from the tape as it will from the cd player, radio etc on the same unit. All you need is the cable (assuming the stereo has line out connecters)

Hm me last post is there twice, guess that's what IE asked me to press "refresh"!, beware the "Back" button

Gyck

Of course, if your uncle has an all in one unit it may not have rca outputs. He may have to use the headphone output...

tman

hmm hopefully that will make some sense to him, yeah hes got his own pc, if he gets the files onto the p.c i can probably help him chop them up and i presume he wants to encode them to mp3 as he wants to burn them onto cd then. cheers

erm, you'd prolly want to record them as a wave file & burn to cd from that...

Woden

yeah that wouldn't be a problem if the wave files where taking up to much space on the hdd they could be got rid of.

pickarooney

Why not just copy them from the tape to the CD with the stereo?
You can't improve on the sound of the original source, and piping it through a PC and then onto CD will be even more lossy than copying it directly.

Korg

and piping it through a PC and then onto CD will be even more lossy than copying it directly.

Probably not so much tho, whether you're copying directly to cd or copying to the pc's hard drive the signal from the tape still has to be sampled. The quality loss in the extra stage transferring a wav on a hard drive to cd is negligible.
In any case these quality losses are small compared to the quality loss in the tape itself.
It's possible Dataisgod doesn't have a dedicated cd recorder anyway.

Woden

Thanks for all the comments folks, we're gonna try the initial method with the 3.5mm cable pick one up in maplin or peats, or richer sounds. anymore ideas or hints though keep em coming.

Woden

Just to say thanks folks from the uncle. he's headed home and sucessfully got music from tape onto the computer, he just needs to mess around with the settings and stuff and break up the file.

so thanks again

Data