Tips for How to Record from Audio Tape

Compact cassette tapes were designed to be portable, but not necessarily to be durable. As tape stock ages, it is susceptible to wear and breakage, particularly when the fast forward and rewind functions are the only rapid means of accessing a particular song on an album.

No pre amplification is required to connect a cassette deck to your computer. Simply connect an RCA cable to the Line Out or Tape Out jacks on the deck, and connect the other end of the RCA cable to the Line In jacks on your sound card. If the Line In jack is a 1/8" phono plug jack, use an RCA-to-1/8" plug adapter.

If your tape deck only offers a headphone jack as an output, you can use a cable with stereo 1/8" plugs at either end to connect it to your computer. Before you adjust the sound card input level, be sure to adjust the headphone volume on the tape deck to about two thirds of full volume, too low a level will allow a great deal of background noise, and too high may introduce distortion. You may have to experiment to find just the right volume, as this can vary.

The procedure for transferring taped audio to your computer is much the same as that for recording vinyl. There may be a tone at the beginning of Side A and at the end of Side B that can be trimmed out. If the cassette was recorded using a specific type of Dolby noise reduction, this should be enabled on the tape deck before you record to your computer, unless it is Dolby HX Pro, which was designed to play back on any deck without having to be "decoded." If no noise reduction settings were used when the tape was recorded, then do not use the noise reduction settings on the deck. Audio software offers more powerful and flexible methods of reducing hiss and noise once the tracks are recorded to your hard drive. For example, Audacity software lets you select a portion of the recording with a noise or hiss that you want to eliminate throughout the track. Select some of the "silent" portion of your recording and choose Effect > Noise Removal from the top menu; then, click on Get Noise Profile in the dialog box that appears. Choose Effect > Noise Removal again, and you will be asked to what degree you wish to remove the noise that the software detected.

The above procedure can be used with your recorded vinyl as well. Be sure to listen to the result before saving the file, if it is unsatisfactory you can always undo (Ctrl+Z on Windows; Cmd+2 on a Mac).