by Rachelle de Bretagne

Created on: March 18, 2007   Last Updated: April 19, 2007

What can you do when your favourite tracks are on your old tapes and you want them on your computer or to make musical compilations with in MP3 format ?

I came upon this problem with a very old and favourite tape, and tried all kinds of things until I came up with the winning combination, which we nicknamed "Low Tech". I wasn't sure it would work but it does.

Required tools for the task:

Walkman with fully charged batteries (and spares if you are doing loads)
Lead from headphone socket of walkman to microphone socket of computer (easily available in computer and electrical shops)
Media recorder and here I used the standard Windows sound recorder.
Playback device such as Winamp, Windows Media Player or Real player.
An abundance of patience.

Using a Walkman, and here you could use any tape player at all, I decided that there has to be a way to send sound from the out socket of the walkman to the in socket on the computer. It didn't take a lot of working out and getting the appropriate wire was easy too. One tip here is to ensure that the leads are long enough to get from the computer to the player so you don't have to stretch too much to make adjustments to the sound quality on the walkman.

Plugging a wire into the headphone socket of the walkman, and into the microphone socket of the computer, I found that I could record directly to Windows sound recorder. Testing levels was pretty easy too as you have a band which shows what is acceptable.

It's a tricky business, because if you want each track as a separate MP3, it takes a little bit of time switching off both recorder and Walkman in between tracks, and although the quality wasn't as good as it could have been with standard CD, it was viable enough to give me the songs I craved for on my computer.

Next the task took me into making the files into MP3. Here, there are many choices though I used Winamp as I have a personal preference for this and it made the exercise easy.

One of the snags I had was that on first trials I found that I needed to adjust the quality of sound on the walkman itself to its optimal for the kind of music that I was transferring, and the quality was sufficient not to worry about further tweaking.

If you are going to do the job yourself, set enough time aside, as it is time consuming, although well worth the effort. Sometimes low tech works and in this case it did.

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