Audio Cassette to CD
If you’re like me, you’ve probably got boxes of audio cassettes in your garage.
They’ve made many moves with me and yet, I never seem to have the time to listen to them. Not to mention I don’t even own a tape deck anymore. The only way to listen to my old mix tapes from my teenage years that good friends had given me would be to transfer them to CD. I do a lot of these transfers in my professional life and there are a lot of misconceptions about these types of transfers. First of all, I use very good equipment for playback as well as for recording. It’s not that sophisticated though. I use my Alesis tape deck to play back and I go through a pair of RCA cables into the CD recording device. I play the tape back. If there’s a hiss, I turn on the Noise Reduction. If not, I simply set the record level so it’s not hitting the reds when it peaks at the top volume. I pull back a little if it is. Then I simply press play on the Alesis and record on the CD recorder.
A CD can hold 80 minutes worth of audio in contrast to an audio cassette which could be anywhere from 30 minutes to 120 minutes. Therefore if a tape is more than 80 minutes long I will use 2 discs, one for each side. Also, the equipment does not generally create a new track every time a new song is on when conducting this type of transfer. It’s better with vinyl. So if a client needs everything cleaned up and organized, I can do that no problem. But it does take a little longer so I charge about $35/tape for that service. Of course if you just have one song you need, I won’t charge you the full amount. It would be more like $10. Also, sometimes people need MP3 files, which is a compressed audio format. My machine creates AIFF files so I would be able to convert that using software on my Mac. MP3s can be very good files for the web and for email because they tend to be pretty small while retaining a decent quality. For more on audio transfers feel free to contact us here directly. Or call (323) 469-0707
