strathspey@strathspey.org:45320

Brian Charlton

Re: Copying Cassettes onto CD

May 19, 2006, 2:02 a.m. (Message 45320, in reply to message 45309)

G'Day, All,

I have transferred a lot of my cassettes (usually copies of LPs) onto CD.
The programme I have used is CoolEdit, which was shareware, but has not been
bought out by Adobe and sold on as Audition (at a much increased price!). I
have also tried Audacity, which has the benefit of being free and is just as
capable as CoolEdit.

To do the job completely requires a significant amount of time. Cassettes
generally have background hum and other noises and it is preferable to
remove this noise from the tracks. The technique is to sample a part of the
'silent' area (between tracks) to establish the background noise profile,
then apply that profile to the whole side.

After noise reduction, the tracks should be normalised so that all tracks
have the same sound setting.

Splitting the tracks is easy. Highlight one track and copy the highlighted
area to the clipboard. Open a new file and copy the clipboard into the new
file. Save the file with the name of the dance. You can save as a wave file
or MP3, WMA or whatever you prefer.

Brian Charlton,
Sydney, Australia