Floyd Messages: 27 Registered: July 2018 Location: London
Chancellor
My aunt has given me an old tape recorder that was popular with teenagers in the seventies. It has some old piano music on it that was played by some of my older relatives.
Any bright ideas about the best way to get this music onto digital so I can share it around the family members?
gofar99 Messages: 1955 Registered: May 2010 Location: Southern Arizona
Illuminati (5th Degree)
Hi, Since it is analog you will need to make it play to copy it to digital. Most PCs have an audio input of some sort. It will be either line level or mic level. Line is the better choice. The problem is whether or not the tape player has a suitable output. Many have line outputs and that would be the choice to use. A direct connection from them to the line inputs on a PC. Other devices can also have audio inputs (phones, tablets etc) and will also work to varying degrees. If there is no line output on the tape player then it may have an earphone output and you can try that with the line inputs on the recording device. Depending on the quality of the audio from the tape player you can often adjust the recording on the PC (etc). I would not go below 24/96 for the resulting files. A program such as Audacity (free BTW) on a PC makes editing easy. You can also clean up the sound a bit. Once the file is digital it is easy to send to other folks.
JazzHog Messages: 33 Registered: July 2018 Location: Leeds, England
Baron
Thankyou for mentioning Audacity, gofar99, I may take a look at that. It sounds like it might be useful for some of my little pet projects. It's good to see that it's free and open source.
I think there used to be a course in sound technology at my local tech, but I'm not sure if it still exists, (or probably now it's really expensive to do!).
What is the difference between the bit rates? I used Audacity before. I set the bit rate to 320 Kbps thinking that it is the best quality. Is this a good practice?
gofar99 Messages: 1955 Registered: May 2010 Location: Southern Arizona
Illuminati (5th Degree)
What format was the 320? It sounds like you were making MP3s. I use Audacity to make 24/96 wav copies of vinyl and use that with a high quality external sound card to put onto tape...just opposite of what you are doing. If the original tapes you have are only modest quality then MP3 is probably OK. Some of the other formats might make better copies though.
Oh, I'm sorry about that. You were right that I was referring to MP3. I didn't think you were making a "wav" file. We were using the same software, but different outputs.
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