[cgu]

I'm wondering if there is an easy way (for a basic computer user-myself) to convert/copy some of my old casette tapes onto cd. I have a powerbook G4 and wondered if anyone had simple suggestions. I did a search on this topic on this forum and found one post but I was not familiar with some of the terminology.
Thanks for the help.

[brianb]

Heres what you will need

1. Cassete Deck.

2 Strero RCA line out to 1/8" stereo mini jack cable

3.Audio inputdevice. Cheapest solution for you is probally going to be the Griffen iMic (about $30)

4 audio recording software like Peak DV or something similar

5. Roxio Toast software

hook the cassete to the iMic with the setero line cable. Make sure the iMic input is set to line input and not the mic input. Record into whatever software you happen to get. You may decided that you need to add some filters tothe sound recording after you are done to try and clean up some of the Tape hiss. You can probally record straight to Aiff format in the recording software which is what you will need for the cd. Use Roxio toast to create the Cd tracks and burn your disc.

not hard you just need the right stuff and a little gumption to sit there and record everything.


Hope this helps

[SSharon]

You may also want to look into a neat app called WireTap. It just records whatever audio your mac is playing to an aiff file. Its very easy to use but it is real time and you need to be careful about hitting the volume up an down buttons on the keyboard as it will record that funny sound it makes when you hit them. You can get it from here.
Good Luck and post back with more details, comments, questions.

[suprz's ghost]

why do AIFF files take up so much HD room? with "final vinyl", a normal song takes up 40-50 MB's of HD space. other songs in my itunes library only take up 4-5 mb's what gives? I have checked and there is no way that i can see to change the settings that it saves an audio recording to anything different that would take less space

[Spheric Harlot]

Originally posted by suprz's ghost:
why do AIFF files take up so much HD room? with "final vinyl", a normal song takes up 40-50 MB's of HD space. other songs in my itunes library only take up 4-5 mb's what gives? I have checked and there is no way that i can see to change the settings that it saves an audio recording to anything different that would take less space

um.

mp3's are COMPRESSED audio. The format works by throwing away audio information based upon psychoacoustic phenomena (such as masking, where our hearing tends to not notice a softer sound occurring at the same time as a louder sound). mp3 is reduced data - which is also why it sounds drastically worse than raw CD audio in a direct comparison.

AIFF is uncompressed, non-reduced audio data, which at CD resolution is 16 bits (2 bytes) at 44.1kHz per second per channel, which comes out to about 88 Kilobytes per second, or 5MB per minute per channel.

On a stereo file, you get approximately 10MB per minute of audio.

Which figures, since you get 650MB of data on a standard CD, which is 74 minutes of audio minus some overhead for error correction algorithms.

-s*

[suprz's ghost]

o.k. so....there is no way for me to compress the aiff file?
and i just have to be satisfied with using up all my HD space?
but if all recorded audio is an AIFF format, how do they get to be MP3's?

i have a feeling i'm lost.........

[Spheric Harlot]

Originally posted by suprz's ghost:
o.k. so....there is no way for me to compress the aiff file?
and i just have to be satisfied with using up all my HD space?
but if all recorded audio is an AIFF format, how do they get to be MP3's?

When you insert a CD and have iTunes "rip" it to disk, it encodes the audio to whatever format you have set in the preferences. So it actually reads the CD and converts it to mp3 (or aac).

There is a Free Lossless Audio Compression codec (aptly called FLAC) that will reduce the size of your audio files without actually throwing away data (and thus reducing sound quality). However, this results in .flac files that need to be de-compressed before you can play them, so it's useless for anything but data transfer and archiving.

Digital media aren't magical entities, unfortunately (though I've often wished that). If you want full quality, you pay for gigabytes.

-s*

[brianb]

Originally posted by suprz's ghost:
o.k. so....there is no way for me to compress the aiff file?
and i just have to be satisfied with using up all my HD space?
but if all recorded audio is an AIFF format, how do they get to be MP3's?

i have a feeling i'm lost.........

you only use the HD space while you are working on the files tehn you burn them to a cd and then delete the master files IF YOU DON"T NEED THEM. 1 disc is only 700mb even a book that takes 18 hours of audio will only be about 12.5 gigs which is small in comparison to most Audio and Video things Remember that Audio can grow to be much larger if you deal with higher sampling and say surround sound

[cgu]

Thanks for all the answers to my query. I appreciate all the help.
Cheryl