Recording Your Old Cassettes and Records With Your Computer Part 2

Please Read Part 1 of this article, unless you have already.

Noise reduction and equilization

Its good to have a few seconds of dead air at the beginning or end of the recorded track. We can use this dead air to create a noise reduction filter that will remove the background noise only from the track. In (cool edit) select the dead air and go to effects-noise reduction- and you will find a button that says get profile from selection. Click the button and close this dialog box. Select the entire recording and reopen the noise reduction dialog box slide the slider to the appropriate amount of filtering (50-95 percent depending on how good or bad the initial recording is.) now hit enter, be prepared to wait a while, tapes can take 10-20 min depending on how fast your computer can process. You can test this process on a small selection of sound and use undo if your facing some trial and error with your noise reduction results.

Formats for Recording and Back-up

.wav and .mp3 formats are the most commonly used formats in backing up your old cassettes and records. .wav is an uncompressed file that has really good quality this is the file format you use to burn CD's that will play in your CD player. But .mp3 is great for compressed music which will play in only some cd players but will play on all computers. .mp3 has many different compression rates the common ones are 128, 240, 360 kbps (kilo bits per second). At 128 kbps you can start to notice some compression loss in the music.

Tips, Tricks, and Troubleshooting

Tip: an old cassette walkman works as a good alternative to a tape deck but your will need a 1/8 inch to 1/8 inch cable. Tip: Make sure your noise reduction button is off when recording from the tape deck to the computer. If left on you will lose alot of high end in the recording. Any noise reduction filters should be applied after the initial raw recording is taken Problem: I recently came into a very trouble some issue when hooking up a PC to record sound, the on-board sound card was faulty and it was giving me a very extensive feed back noise in the range of about 30-40 db, this was giving me a very unacceptable noise floor of about -35 db. Solution: I had to install a cheap old Sound Blaster PCI 128 sound card. You will need to go into your computer BIOS and disable your on-board sound card. This brought my terrible sound floor from -35 db to about -70 db, which will be fine for recording old cassettes on this machine.

I hope with the aid of this tutorial you will be well on your way to recording your old cassette tapes and vinyl records, and listening to them on your new ipod or mp3 player.