Quoting Judah Milgram <milg...@cgpp.com>:
A question to liven up the dog days of summer.
I'm considering solutions to convert some cassette tapes to MP3.
I suspect that a cassette deck you could pick up at a thrift store
would be higher quality than whatever's in the gizmo you're
considering. It would probably cost less, too.
If I were doing this--and I do it a lot, albeit not (usually) from
cassettes or of language tapes--I would play it back from a cassette
deck plugged into a mixer plugged into the soundcard. The mixer allows
you to adjust the level the soundcard "sees," though most can probably
take a -10 (consumer standard) without overloading the front end.
Since you probably don't have a mixer (I'm not talking about he
software that ALSA calls a mixer), just connect the cassette deck to
the sound card. You can get a stereo RCA plugs to 1/8" TRS plug
adaptor at Radio Shack. If they don't stock it, Mark Electronic in
Beltsville might.
IMHO, the best cheap sound card is the old Ensoniq 1370 (not 1371!).
It works fine under Linux; I used it for years. You can probaly get
one off eBay or suchlike for under $20.
Even for language cassettes I'd record to WAV files. You can always
dumb them down however you want, but, honestly, nowadays with reliable
multi-terabyte drives under $100 and everybody but me with a
high-speed Internet connection, I just no longer "get" using lossy
compression formats at all. (Of course, I also don't get reality TV or
anything or anybody named Kardashian. Face it, I'm just out of touch!)
Audacity will do any two-channel editing you need to do. Though it
always seems to have some bugs that will cause it to crash, it'll also
get the job done, and the price is certainly right. It's what I use.
HTH.
Howard Sanner
linux-au...@terrier.ampexguy.com
