Sunday, June 6, 2010

Do You Have a Cassette Deck Somewhere?

I need a cassette deck of the sort that plugs into a stereo receiver.  I foolishly let mine (and the rest of the 1970s era stereo system) go a few years back--and I have a bunch of cassettes that I would like to convert to CD.  Some of them are not commercial releases--so I can't go out and just buy a CD version.  If you have one lying around that you haven't disposed of yet, I would be quite happy to pay shipping, as long as it has RCA phono jack connectors, which indicates that it was intended to plug into a stereo receiver.  (I can buy them for $10 - $20 locally--so it doesn't make sense to buy one of the USB versions.)

UPDATE: I found a perfectly functional tape deck for $17.50.  It's still a bit overwhelming to the microphone input.  (No line input on this notebook.)  I'll try the line input on my wife's computer instead.

UPDATE 2: Yes, plugged into the line input port on my wife's PC this works beautifully.  Back when The Eagles Greatest Hits came out on vinyl (yes, I'm dating myself), I recorded the album to a cassette tape.  Yes, each transfer--from vinyl to cassette, and now from cassette to digital--has some data loss and noise added.  Would I consider this acceptable sitting in my living room?  Maybe not.  But if I'm blasting Hotel California in the Corvette with the top off at 60 mph--I won't be able to tell.  And I have some stuff that is of interest to my family that is on cassette that needs to be digitized for posterity.

1 comment:

  1. Clayton - My wife had an extensive collection of vinyl and cassettes that I just spent WEEKS transferring to digital using a dual-tape deck (with an audio out) plugged into the audio in on my desktop. I used a free program called Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/) that was simple and user friendly.

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