On Wednesday 02 Feb 2011 1:28:08 pm [email protected] wrote: > To go farther into history - a fast digitizing option that works on > cassette tapes? > This is the single most painful thing I have ever done in my life. I used a portable (Walkman) player to play the cassette to record 60 MB MP3s in which all the songs were "joined up". Audiograbber was the program I used and it has the option of splitting songs if there is a break in sound for a period of time that you can specify - but the process was undependable. Hence each MP3 had one side of a tape - but heck I could turn it on for recording and go away for half an hour and often managed one or two cassettes a day with 2-3 visits to a desktop dedicated to this job over 90 minutes or so.
I later sat and used sound editors like Goldwave or Adobe Audition to split the files into individual songs and saved them - renaming them with an appropriate program. CDs can be ripped straight to MP3s in the background and all you need to do is to remember to put one in when you sit down in front of your machine and repeat that as often as you can. I also manually digitised the 50 or so gramophone records I had. Apart from this I converted about 200 hours of VHS tape into VCD quality and later DVD quality video and scanned 1500 transparencies and about 200 ancient B/W negatives. I have a desktop dedicated to jobs such as this. PS the video below is a song I digitised from a cassette tape which was itself a copy of something I borrowed from a library in Bolton (England) - a rare one from The Who. As soon as I uploaded it YouTube informed me that the video had content that was probably copyrighted and the video would not be available in Germany. Sorry about that to all you folks in Germany :( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYTTvqKb3aU shiv
