Tergiversations of a Traveling Mind

I've been going through a lot of my media recently -- CDs, DVDs, and computer disks -- with an eye toward making backups on my recently-purchased 1TB drive. *squee*

But I also realized just how many casette tapes I have that I never listen (but would like to) to because I haven't had a car or a stereo system with a tape player in years. I have a tape player, mind you, but it has to be plugged in, and it sounds pretty tinny if you turn the volume up too high.

So I was contemplating what to do about them. Some of them I could easily purchase CDs for, but a lot of them are custom mixes made for me by friends, local radio shows that aren't available for download/purchase, or recordings of concerts that my mother performed in -- essentially irreplaceable.

However, while browsing through various connector cables at Amazon.com, I stumbled across a brilliant (and cheap!) solution:

Step 1: purchase a male-to-male audio cable ($7, including S/H)



Step 2: plug one end of the cable into the headphone jack of your tape player. Plug the other end into the microphone jack of your computer. (Do whatever steps you need to configure your particular operating system for using a microphone if it doesn't already work)

Step 3: download Audacity if you don't already have it. It's a free audio editor that works on Windows/Mac/Linux.

Step 4: press play on the tape recorder. Press the record button in Audacity. When the tape stops, pause the recording; flip the tape over; press play and un-pause the recording until you have the whole tape recorded.

Step 5: export to MP3 (you might need to download an MP3 encoder) or ogg or other audio file of choice, and then use cut and paste to turn it into individual songs. The silence between songs on the tape makes it really easy to see where to cut.

Presto! Your tapes are now backed up to your computer, and you can transfer them to your music player or burn them to CD.

And it cost me less than $10. Yipee!