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Hi from England! Is there a way I can get that shoebox full of old cassettes and record them onto a CD, using my SD Powerbook G4 ? I don't have any other peripherals, and am not technically minded, go easy on the jargon, please!!
Thanks a lot.
This shouldn't be too difficult to achieve. Here's what you'll need:
1) Cable with a stereo mini-jack on one end and whatever connector you have on the 'line out' of your tape player (usually an 'RCA' plug). You can get this type of cable in any electronics shop for under £5. A good one will sound better though. You'll plug this into the back of your hi-fi and the other end (stereo mini-jack) into the audio in on the PB.
2) Software for the PB to record the incoming sound. You'll need to go into System Prefs to select Sound In as the input channel. It should be set to internal microphone normally. Then you'll need an application that can record from a sound source. You should be able to find lots of sound recorders through Versiontracker. I think Audion can do this job. Check your levels a few times to make sure there's no distortion.
3) After recording you will wind up with one big AIFF file (sound file) per side of your tape (unless you stop the recording after each song). Now you'll need to edit the AIFF to split it into separate tracks. You can do that in iMovie or in any number of shareware utilities (check Versiontracker again). Audion has an mp3 editor but I'm not sure if it can edit AIFF.
4) Make a Playlist in iTunes, drag the AIFF files onto it and click burn!
That's it. You can get fancy and try to improve the quality of the tape recording with some plugins (Audio Hijack or others), but this is probably not necessary if the tapes are reasonably good quality.
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