Audio tapes to MP3
Wednesday, November 4, 2009 at 10:56PM An old box full of audiotapes has been dusted out.
They contain precious recordings from 1977 to 1994..
Including the only tape of my childhood voice singing a few lines of "kandar Shasti kavasam", my grandpa reciting Vishnu Sahasranamam for me the day before I first left for the US of A, my grandma singing me my favorite Carnatic songs, audio of a concert where I got to sit on the stage (as Mic boy) and enjoy Lalgudi Jayaraman and his kids perform, etc. etc.
Most of the tapes seem to be deteriorating and I might have one chance to transfer them to digital format before they self destruct!
so the question is..
If any of you who read this blog in the US have converted Audio tapes to MP3, is there a product out there that you would recommend? (some kind of tape recorder that outputs MP3? or connects to your laptop through USB? and then you can import it into itunes?)
Please do let me know.
Life has been busy with work, ice cream, physiotherapy, listening to music, voting, enjoying time with the wife and kids, not particularly in any order..
Lots to write, but it has to wait. Until Friday...
.
Reader Comments (8)
please note: my tape player/cd player is a 1993 make sony LBD 550
which looks like a monster and has no audio out ports!
I have not done this conversion myself but my husband did. I just spoke to him, he said that "I used the following - a decent quality walkman, audiograbber (software), a male-to-male stereo jack and mp3gain. there is always some amount of background white noise due to the connectors etc. but you can get rid of them by playing around with audacity"
Please feel free to send me a note (akay@madras2madurai.com) if you are interested / have more questions - I can connect you with my husband so you can talk some geeky stuff :)
Few links of interest:
http://mp3gain.sourceforge.net/
http://www.audiograbber.com-us.net/
Me too ! I am looking to do the same !
Sundar,
My cousin told me that 'Fry's' is selling a USB unit that does what you want to do. In fact he was going to buy it this weekend.
I'll call you later this weekend.
Please check it out at your local Fry's.
A-kay, thanks.
NV Sir is on to something. got two people telling me that there is a gizmo that connects through USB drive which directly lets you read tape into laptop.
going to check it out in fry's tomorrow.
:)
Kavi, if we get this here, will let you know..
:)
went to frys.
three options 99/149/199 $
the 99 $ one is out of stock.
has a single tape deck with all kinds of knobs to speed up tape, cut hiss, noise, etc. etc. and outputs through USB to a computer. does not come with any software!
so ruled out.
going to go with the std 128 bit rate record using a borrowed walkman and an audio output cable and some freeware.
the only problem.. I get one shot at this with some of the tapes that are in bad condition.. and if I blow this, that is it!
:(
I read somewhere that Philips Rip-all is good. Not sure if its available there.