May 18, 2006, 4:50 p.m. (Message 45318, in reply to message 45309)
Alan: I have been using Total Recorder, Standard Edition, from www.highcriteria.com, for a number of years now. It costs $17.95 (U.S.) and this includes future updates to the program. I have transferred some LPs and quite a few tapes to CD, although I now have the separate tracks on my laptop for use in class. The program is easy to use. You will need a cable to hook up the earphone jack of your cassette player to the input jack on the sound card of your computer. Start the computer program and the cassette player and make sure that the volume level is not too high or you may get distortion. When you have copied a side (of the tape or LP) it is easy to save each dance selection separately, either as .wav files (recommended if you are going to transfer to CD) or .mp3 files (which are not as high quality, but take up much less space on your hard disk). Note that you will have to give each selection a name -- if you want them in the same order as on the tape, then "1", "2", "3" etc. would be fine. To transfer the tracks to CD, I use Windows Media Player (free), although there are lots of other programs available. Insert a CD-R into your CD writer, choose the program you want to do the copying, point to the directory with the selections in it, highlight the selections, and copy. It sounds complicated, but it's actually quite straightforward. Eric