Pretty much following the advice and suggestions here, I’ve embarked on a little project of transferring a few old cassette tapes to audio CDs. It’s worked pretty well and I thought I might as well report my experience.

I bought a cable with two RCA audio plugs at one end and a 1/8" (3.5 mm) stereo-mini plug at the other end. This connects a tape deck to my iMac.

“Audio Recorder”, as suggested by Steve Rea, works just great! It is simple, easy to use, and produces a single WAV file from the tape. I first ran parts of the tape to set the level and then did a complete recording of both sides of the tape.

On to Steve’s other choice. I found Audacity a little less intuitively obvious  to use, but there is an Audacity Wiki site that has some helpful information. (http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Main_Page)  Audacitys chief  attraction is that it is free & gets the job done, even if it seems a little buggy at times. I found it helpful to keep all files for each project in a unique file or sub-files.

Audacity can import the WAV file that Audio Recorder produced and separate it into tracks, applying a title to each (with the name of the song, for example). Audacity also lets you cut and paste, delete, process for noise and a bunch of other classy things, but these really need to be done before you designate the tracks, as the markers currently do not “stick” with the audio but with a separate marker track.

After marking the tracks you can then “export multiple” from Audacity as WAV files. This yields a separate WAV file for each track with each file labeled with the track name. (If you choose the right options).

I then dragged these files onto a new and appropriately titled playlist in iTunes. (You might want to check the import preferences for iTunes first).

Finally I used the burn disk function in iTunes to produce an audio CD!

It seems like a complex process when described, but it works pretty cleanly. Most time is spent playing the tape while recording the initial file.

The icing on the cake is that iTunes will print out a very classy little CD jewel box liner from the print options.  You can even make up a template for the back and edge liner (if you’re using the thick CD cases).  I scanned the art from the tape liner and printed it on the iTunes printout. If you didn’t care about copyright piracy you could almost sell these at the public market on Saturdays!

Now on to old LPs!

Last edited by kcupery (March 5th, 2010 9:58:18 PM)