Much has been written about the demise of physical media. Long considered the measure of technological progress in audiovisual and computing fields, the 2000s saw this metric seemingly rendered obs…
i was a recording engineer during the time analog recording was just starting to get surpassed by digital
I’ve got a cassette of some parody songs made by a local radio station that’s basically going to become lost media if I don’t digitize it myself. The only cassette players I currently own are a Walkman and one of those retro-style-but-not-old CD/cassette/record combo players. Do you have any advice on what I should do to get the best quality transfer that I can?
That’s actually very easy to do and you don’t need any special equipment. Simply use a male-male 3.5mm cable and connect one end from the stereo output of the cassette player and the other end into the microphone jack of any computer you own. Play the cassette - you can test the audio quality by running arecord -f cd - | aplay - - you will have to tune the volume output of the cassette player and the input sensitivity of the microphone.
From there, if you’re paranoid, you could use arecord to save the output to a .wav file and encode it once the recording is done, but I had no problem just using oggenc directly on the piped audio. The final command looked like this: arecord -f cd - | oggenc -q 5 -o file.ogg - (change to -q10 if you want lossless encoding).
I’m not sure if this is the best quality per se, but I would definitely recommend it over using specialized equipment like cassette-mp3 converters. The problem with those devices is that if they use underpowered hardware, you might experience buffering issues where the encoding hardware can’t keep up with the audio stream or something like that. But doing it on a computer ensures that you will have all the processing power you need to make sure that this doesn’t happen.
Good luck! I found it very easy to do - it took 5-10 minutes of setup.
1st thing i would do would be call the radio station–they might have a digital copy already, since it’s a performance. or they might have the equipment you’d need to get it digitized. just don’t leave the tape with them, unless you make a copy.
failing that, the public library might also have tape to digital conversion gear, depending on how big/well funded the library is.
last resort would be a recording studio, which might cost lots of money per hour, and it’ll have to be converted in real time–play the tape from start to finish, while the computer ‘records’ it. if the studio don’t have a top of the line gourmet tape deck, then they can take just take the output of your own player and plug it into protools, just ask for the highest resolution/bitrate in a lossless format
edit: i forgot another option, if you’re in the states. you might try your state archives, just google the name of your state along with “archive”, it should be a .gov address. they might actually be interested in the recording for their own digital collection, and would definitely have the necessary gear to get it digitized. the tricky part is they would need the permission of the radio station and/or whoever owns the copyright to post it publicly
1st thing i would do would be call the radio station–they might have a digital copy already
It hasn’t existed since 2003 (there’s still a station on that frequency, but it’s changed ownership and programming a couple of times). Maybe they still have the old master copies anyway? Or I suppose I could try to track down the DJs who produced it…
The library and state archives ideas are good suggestions; I’ll look into them.
last resort would be a recording studio, which might cost lots of money per hour, and it’ll have to be converted in real time–play the tape from start to finish, while the computer ‘records’ it. if the studio don’t have a top of the line gourmet tape deck, then they can take just take the output of your own player and plug it into protools
I mean, if using my own player might be considered “good enough,” couldn’t I just hook my Walkman’s headphone output to the line in or mic input on my computer and do it myself? In addition to the audio built into the motherboard, I also have a relatively-cheap USB audio interface, which I guess isn’t as good as it could be (it’s 48KHz, not 192KHz) but would still be better than nothing.
The main thing is I’m not sure how I need to set the volume on the Walkman (it also apparently has a feature called “AVLS” that might or might not be relevant) or if I need an amplifier or something. I also don’t know if I need to do anything special with ALSA/JACK/PulseAudio and know basically nothing about how to use Ardour or XMMS (I’m aware they exist and are the right type of software, but that’s about it).
if using my own player might be considered “good enough,” couldn’t I just hook my Walkman’s headphone output to the line in or mic input on my computer and do it myself?
absolutely, i was responding to your question
any advice on what I should do to get the best quality transfer that I can?
other users have mentioned you can get a converter online, but the “you get what you pay for” maxim applies to electronics maybe more than anything else. the difference in quality between “consumer” and “professional” audio gear is getting narrower, but it’s still there-- everything just depends on how much you want to spend
not sure how I need to set the volume on the Walkman
if the walkman has a “line out” port, you’d use that to plug into your “line in” on your recording device. you can use the headphone jack, but that signal is already amplified, so you’ll have to adjust the output volume to where the input meter is the highest it can be without ever clipping (going ‘red’). older consumer gear will have more noise (hiss) than anything professional. especially an amplified signal, as in a headphone jack. and that’s where the money for pro stuff goes–lower noise floor. more information
edit: on a whim i did some looking and found this lol
you could just buy that, dump the recording down to a SD card, and then return the device the next day. done.
i had no idea they made such things, but i haven’t really kept up with the music/audio industry since i left
While the quality won’t be particularly good, a cheap cassette-to-MP3 converter off Amazon can ensure that the material at least isn’t lost forever. Run the tape through 2-3 times to make sure you get at least one decent copy of everything. Once you’ve got that done, escalate as suggested by solsangraal to get a better transfer.
I’ve got a cassette of some parody songs made by a local radio station that’s basically going to become lost media if I don’t digitize it myself. The only cassette players I currently own are a Walkman and one of those retro-style-but-not-old CD/cassette/record combo players. Do you have any advice on what I should do to get the best quality transfer that I can?
That’s actually very easy to do and you don’t need any special equipment. Simply use a male-male 3.5mm cable and connect one end from the stereo output of the cassette player and the other end into the microphone jack of any computer you own. Play the cassette - you can test the audio quality by running
arecord -f cd - | aplay -- you will have to tune the volume output of the cassette player and the input sensitivity of the microphone.From there, if you’re paranoid, you could use
arecordto save the output to a.wavfile and encode it once the recording is done, but I had no problem just usingoggencdirectly on the piped audio. The final command looked like this:arecord -f cd - | oggenc -q 5 -o file.ogg -(change to-q 10if you want lossless encoding).I’m not sure if this is the best quality per se, but I would definitely recommend it over using specialized equipment like cassette-mp3 converters. The problem with those devices is that if they use underpowered hardware, you might experience buffering issues where the encoding hardware can’t keep up with the audio stream or something like that. But doing it on a computer ensures that you will have all the processing power you need to make sure that this doesn’t happen.
Good luck! I found it very easy to do - it took 5-10 minutes of setup.
1st thing i would do would be call the radio station–they might have a digital copy already, since it’s a performance. or they might have the equipment you’d need to get it digitized. just don’t leave the tape with them, unless you make a copy.
failing that, the public library might also have tape to digital conversion gear, depending on how big/well funded the library is.
last resort would be a recording studio, which might cost lots of money per hour, and it’ll have to be converted in real time–play the tape from start to finish, while the computer ‘records’ it. if the studio don’t have a top of the line gourmet tape deck, then they can take just take the output of your own player and plug it into protools, just ask for the highest resolution/bitrate in a lossless format
edit: i forgot another option, if you’re in the states. you might try your state archives, just google the name of your state along with “archive”, it should be a .gov address. they might actually be interested in the recording for their own digital collection, and would definitely have the necessary gear to get it digitized. the tricky part is they would need the permission of the radio station and/or whoever owns the copyright to post it publicly
It hasn’t existed since 2003 (there’s still a station on that frequency, but it’s changed ownership and programming a couple of times). Maybe they still have the old master copies anyway? Or I suppose I could try to track down the DJs who produced it…
The library and state archives ideas are good suggestions; I’ll look into them.
I mean, if using my own player might be considered “good enough,” couldn’t I just hook my Walkman’s headphone output to the line in or mic input on my computer and do it myself? In addition to the audio built into the motherboard, I also have a relatively-cheap USB audio interface, which I guess isn’t as good as it could be (it’s 48KHz, not 192KHz) but would still be better than nothing.
The main thing is I’m not sure how I need to set the volume on the Walkman (it also apparently has a feature called “AVLS” that might or might not be relevant) or if I need an amplifier or something. I also don’t know if I need to do anything special with ALSA/JACK/PulseAudio and know basically nothing about how to use Ardour or XMMS (I’m aware they exist and are the right type of software, but that’s about it).
absolutely, i was responding to your question
other users have mentioned you can get a converter online, but the “you get what you pay for” maxim applies to electronics maybe more than anything else. the difference in quality between “consumer” and “professional” audio gear is getting narrower, but it’s still there-- everything just depends on how much you want to spend
if the walkman has a “line out” port, you’d use that to plug into your “line in” on your recording device. you can use the headphone jack, but that signal is already amplified, so you’ll have to adjust the output volume to where the input meter is the highest it can be without ever clipping (going ‘red’). older consumer gear will have more noise (hiss) than anything professional. especially an amplified signal, as in a headphone jack. and that’s where the money for pro stuff goes–lower noise floor. more information
edit: on a whim i did some looking and found this lol
you could just buy that, dump the recording down to a SD card, and then return the device the next day. done.
i had no idea they made such things, but i haven’t really kept up with the music/audio industry since i left
While the quality won’t be particularly good, a cheap cassette-to-MP3 converter off Amazon can ensure that the material at least isn’t lost forever. Run the tape through 2-3 times to make sure you get at least one decent copy of everything. Once you’ve got that done, escalate as suggested by solsangraal to get a better transfer.