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Gather these items: good quality cassette player, RCA-out to 1/8-in cable. I use Audacity, a freeware audio editor that can do everything, without paying lots of dinero for audio software.
The first thing to remember is that the rule of thumb with audio files is GIGO, Garbage In Garbage Out. Cassettes were available in different price ranges, higher priced cassettes were made of better metal, and the difference in sound quality between a ferro-chrome cassette, and a "normal bias" tape were quite evident. When I was in the Army, stationed in Darmstadt, Germany, in the early '80s, I had a Technics linear tracking turntable, an Akai dual quick-reverse, auto-format sensing cassette deck, a Technics receiver (SA-828). In short, as high tech as audio could be short of reel-to-reel. All of the cassettes I recorded on this equipment was recorded on Dolby B or C noise reduction. No hiss. All my albums were cleaned prior to recording. It has been 25 years, and these cassettes have not lost any of the sound quality they started with. Cool.

Let's talk bitrate. MP3 format compresses music by lopping off the high and low ends of the musio. There is a trade off, between sound quality, and file size. The more you compress a music file, (128 is "near CD quality) the worse it sounds. Simple as that. The next issue is that as you play mp3s they gradually lose sound quality. There are other audio formats, (OggVorbis .ogg), that Audacity supports, and you do everything the same way, but mp3 will be the default audio format here.
Get Started:
CLEAN UP. Open the cassette door, use a cotton swab, wipe the shiny heads inside the cassette player. Turn the swab over, and lightly dab swab into alcohol, and lightly wipe the heads. Using a new cotton swab, wipe the head clean.
LAUNCH AUDACITY

CREATE A NEW FOLDER for the Artist, and if you are thinking of having several albums from the same artist, create a new folder with the album title inside the artist folder. Example: Supertramp (artist) Breakfast In America (album inside the Supertramp folder).

SAVE PROJECT AS . . . When you launch Audacity, save the project before you start, so that if you have to stop, or put your PC asleep, everything will be ready to go. Do not save the .aup file into a folder you will transfer to an mp3 player unless you have over 4 gigs of free memory. These files are quite large, and they only work in Audacity.

SYNC TAPE AND AUDACITY I usually try to see when the music on the cassette starts. Even with factory tapes, the music doesn't start immediately. There is usually be a 5 second gap or more from the beginning of the tape, and the start of the music. I use the display on the cassette player indicating that the music is starting, as a guide.
RECORD You must play the whole cassette. You can close Audacity and edit the music at a later time.

EDIT AND RIP Audacity files look like heartbeats, but are actually sound waves. You look for gaps in the waves, to find, or get close to where each song begins and ends. You select tracks, which can be trimmed down to the second, export them as mp3s.

Learn more about this author, Matt Dresner.
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