Ripping tapes to mp3

A FEW TIPS WHEN RIPPING YOUR CASSETTES :

- Try and use a tape deck. Tape-2-USB players like ones made by ION sound like complete shit. Sorry, no other way of saying that. Obviously a rip is better than nothing, but if you have an interest in turning them into mp3, use a tape deck for much better results.

- Try and connect your line in from the tape deck to your SOUND CARD. A sound card is a seperate piece of equipment for your PC. You may have a PC with no sound card, and instead you are using INTEGRATED SOUND (like realtek HD). This means the sound is coming from your motherboard. This means it's probably going to sound a bit shit. Sound cards cost about £5/$8.

- WATCH OUT FOR VOLUME. If you get 'clipping' during your recording, you are going to have a shit mp3.Clipping is when the volume is too high, and the captured sound is distorted. In Audacity, you can see this when you get a red spike on your recording. Sometimes you may get entire chunks of red spikes. Sometimes the entire recording may be red spikes. Turn the volume down from the program you are using to capture it to result in a much higher quality recording.

- IF YOUR TAPE SOUNDS SHIT ANYWAY maybe the actual tape is just lousy. You can either re-house it in a new tape shell, or you can try and mess around with an audio program to try and improve it. Chances are 5 million percent you will make it worse unless you have an idea of what you are doing.

Regardless of all this, music is music, and if it's the only way to hear it, i'll take a shitty sounding mp3 rather than nothing - but all this stuff is worth keeping in mind, if not for your own personal enjoyment when you listen to your music