Tape to MP3

I tried something new today: converting old audio tapes to MP3s. It turned out to be pretty easy. I don't claim to be an expert yet, I'll recount how I did it anyway.

I used the old "play it and record the output" method for converting tapes. In other words, I hooked the headphone jack of my stereo up to the input jack of my sound card using a spare speaker cable. I then played the tape and used KRec to record the stereo's output and KMix to control the input jack. I then used KRec's export feature to save the recording to a wave file. (Note: When exporting from KRec, make sure that you're at the start of the file, i.e. make sure to rewind first.)

After I had the wave file, the next step was playing with it in Audacity. I don't really know anything about audio engineering, but I managed to chop out extra empty space at the end of the recording, copy and paste two sides of an album together, and things like that. After that, I just exported the result to a wave file again and encoded it with LAME. I used an average bitrate of 64bps to keep the files small. Since most of the tapes I'm converting are comedy albums, sound quality isn't a big concern. I'd much rather be able to get 45 minutes of audio into 17MB than get that extra little bit of quality that I'm not going to notice anyway.

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The audacity to ignore Audacity

I have been doing what you are describing for roughly 4 and a half years. Originally, the best thing running was Audacity. It hasn't changed in my opinion. I record in Audacity because it has a great deal of control and power. I then edit in audacity, split tracks and use Audacity's Export Multiple feature (which I believe was added at my recommendation) to generate all the MP3s back to back (ie. not having to save each one individually). Audacity rocks. I use it for recording tapes, but also live recording of speakers and musicians. The mixing and filtering capabilities, coupled with the unlimited undo (so long as you have HD space) make Audacity a one-stop audio-editing shop. And that doesn't list a great deal of the features.
Nice thing is that it's in the Ubuntu repository :)

Now I am using Audacity

Last time I did this, I actually DID do it (almost) all in Audacity. I didn't do the encoding in Audacity because I didn't find a way to do variable bitrate MP3s. However, the recording process was pretty easy, and I finally managed to figure out how to bump up the volume on the recorded file. And you're right, the unlimited undo is a real life saver. I'm still not an expert, but upon further experimentation, Audacity is definitely much better than the ad hoc method I used the first time.

Turning Cassettes into MP3s

Please tell me where I can find the programs used to convert cassettes to MP3s. Are they free? I have two cassettes of language study that I would LOVE to convert to MP3 files. Is there any way to tell me what I might be using up? I use the Sony mp3 player as of now.

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The audacity to ignore Audacity

Now I am using Audacity

Turning Cassettes into MP3s

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