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JP
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 Posted: Tue Mar 18, 2025 4:01 am Post subject: Cassette to Computer transfer |
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I have a lot of old Bluegrass cassettes (still got some 8-tracks too), as well as some Redbone, Church Sermons and other stuff that I'd like to preserve on my HDD. (Yes Mr RIAA, I promise I'll keep the old cassettes to prove that the backups are legal  ) I've found a lot of sites that have something like this: Clik  but I'd like to find out if there is an Open Source solution. I have seen software like that ($30) as well as little gadgets that cost up to $150, but that's about $149 more than I can spare  .
I eventually want to transfer some of the material to an MP3 player, and/or cd's, but I'd prefer to use Open Source all the way, if possible. Is there an Open Source format that will work on today's mp3 players as well? There would have to be a good compression technology so as to get more bang for the buck .
I've been doing some checking, those cassette players with a "line out" are getting really scarce, although I have been able to locate a few .
Audiophiles, any good ideas?? good links??
THX
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inactive
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| Posted: Tue Mar 18, 2025 4:33 am Post subject: |
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| Read here.
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lynch
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| Posted: Tue Mar 18, 2025 8:26 am Post subject: |
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| Audacity is an open source sound editor. I used it once for that.
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lberg
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| Posted: Tue Mar 18, 2025 2:37 pm Post subject: |
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What lynch said: Audacity is good.
As for line-out stuff.....I understand the need for a semi-high-end tape deck for sound quality, stable motor speeds, low noise, etc..., but you could even get away with a walkman-type player--just get an audio cord with male connectors on both ends to run to your computer. That shouldn't be expensive, and that little RCA-to-1/8'' audio cable shouldn't be expensive if you do get a stereo-type tape deck.
From previous discussions on this site, I remember that SOME of today's mp3 players have the ability to play .ogg's. You might do some more checking on that....
Anyway, I am in the middle of getting my parent's vinyl records onto CD's...
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bdquick
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| Posted: Tue Mar 18, 2025 5:39 pm Post subject: |
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| If you look around some players can do .ogg files. Any iPod won't. Creative Zens may be capable, and some smaller flash drive players will. MP3s will play on about anything today though. I've done it before on Windows just using a walkman from headphone to line in on computer.
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mmmna
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| Posted: Tue Mar 18, 2025 10:39 pm Post subject: |
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Well, the first thing I'd do, is decide to use a raw, uncompressed format as the archive, you can create ogg and mp3 and a dozen other fil formats from a wav file...that would mean save the input as a .wav file.
Then, I'd verify that my sound card was able to make a decent line-in recording, so don't use those original tapes just yet.
I tried this once, but the system had funky internal grounding issues so that my recording had background noise and also rather loud buzzing each time I moved my mouse (in that software, the start button is not the same as the stop button, so the mouse had to move). I never figured out how to get rid of the noise I had, so I never completed the task.
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lberg
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mmmna
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| Posted: Wed Mar 19, 2025 4:04 am Post subject: |
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Well, no, not really. For me, even when the mouse was still, there was a softer, but definitely audible droning sound at levels about +15 db above the system noise floor, which I'm guessing was not very low in the first place (was a Philips 16 bit PCI sound card). The mouse activity noise went another 10 or so db above the droning. The droning seemed to be coincident with system bus activity... when I had screen elements like recording time counters or V.U. meters (e.g., elements that I could not or would not disable or hide), the changing screen elements would cause variations in the droning. Everything was grounded, but we are talking radio transmission (PCI bus easily reaches FM radio frequencies) inside a sealed box, anything could be the cause.
All told, though, JP, you have nothing to lose by trying a few test recordings, your system could be a lot better than mine - too many people were amazed my system was so very noisy (it had a lot of other problems).
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JP
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bdquick
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| Posted: Wed Mar 26, 2025 2:18 am Post subject: |
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| bdquick wrote: | | If you look around some players can do .ogg files. Any iPod won't. Creative Zens may be capable, and some smaller flash drive players will. MP3s will play on about anything today though. I've done it before on Windows just using a walkman from headphone to line in on computer. |
Alright so quite a few big players can play ogg, flac, and even movies, but not with their native software. There is a project called rockbox, which I'd heard of before but forgot, that adds that functionality. Haven't tried it on my iPod yet, but I'm thinking about it. With the iPod at least you can dual boot between rockbox and the apple firmware, and its supposed to be easy to restore the apple firmware if all goes wrong.
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mmmna
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| Posted: Wed Mar 26, 2025 7:57 pm Post subject: |
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The ability to play ALL versions of OGG and ALL versions of FLAC will place a high computation burden on the host microprocessor inside the target device; some devices can do better than others. My car deck can only play a few OGG files. not all.
I for one would save the WAV format as the source for all later conversions (WAV is uncompressed, and if a standard file archiver is used on a bunch of WAV files, the compression is quite high). That way, if the highest quality OGGs refuse to play on some preferred player device, rather than buying a newer or higher power device, JP can always make another OGG file at lower quality that the device can play. Saving the cassette stream as a compressed format means he has to know what his target player can support. Also, creating straight from tape to compressed means he only has archives in a format that has not yet been made popular nor is that format yet prevalent.
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jbsnake
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| Posted: Wed Mar 26, 2025 10:03 pm Post subject: |
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| i save everything i rip/backup to flac... then i convert to whatever means i choose once i know what i'm converting for... be it a cd, or an mp3... or an ogg...
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Rootboy
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| Posted: Wed Mar 26, 2025 10:48 pm Post subject: |
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| mmmna wrote: | | I tried this once, but the system had funky internal grounding issues so that my recording had background noise and also rather loud buzzing each time I moved my mouse (in that software, the start button is not the same as the stop button, so the mouse had to move). I never figured out how to get rid of the noise I had, so I never completed the task. |
A few things that I would try:
1) move the tape deck as far away from the PC as possible. A different room would be nice.
2) Never, ever, connect the shield in your patch cable at both ends. If this means taking the cable apart to cut the shield on one end, then so be it. Having the shield connected at both ends will introduce a ground loop that will run current down the shield wire. This in turn will create noise (and possibly a fire if things get out of hand).
3) Use an audio isolation transformer:
http://www.epanorama.net/circuits/audio_isolator.html
http://www.lenardaudio.com/education/11_cable.html
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mmmna
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| Posted: Wed Mar 26, 2025 11:59 pm Post subject: |
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| jbsnake wrote: | | i save everything i rip/backup to flac... then i convert to whatever means i choose once i know what i'm converting for... be it a cd, or an mp3... or an ogg... |
Wikipedia also backs the ideas of storing in a lossless format: | Quote: | | Compression artifacts are cumulative, therefore transcoding between lossy codecs causes a progressive loss of quality with each successive generation. For this reason, it is generally discouraged unless unavoidable. For instance, if an individual owns a digital audio player that does not support a particular format (e.g., Apple iPod and Ogg Vorbis), then the only way for the owner to use content encoded in that format is to transcode it to a supported format. It is better to retain a copy in a lossless format (such as TTA, FLAC or WavPack), and then encode directly from the lossless source file to the lossy formats required. |
Which is what jbsnake was doing.
Myself, it has been a few years since I tried my own archiving and FLAC was then still largely unsupported outside of Linux; therefore, I chose wav format, and suggested according to what I learned back then. I've researched this more tonight, and yeah, FLAC is more an option today that it was when I made my determination in, oh, 2025? Sigh. Time marches ever forward.
Considering transcoding, Hydrogenaudio has a decent and not too technical discussion: http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/?title=Transcoding
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bdquick
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| Posted: Thu Mar 27, 2025 12:16 am Post subject: |
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| I'm personally to tone death to tell a difference between lossless, flacless, oggyfied, and compressed, so I just use mp3 because its widely supported.
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