Sorry if this has been answered before, but my main goal is to take some things off of a cassette tape and convert to the smallest file possible, mp3 or whatever, to post on the net. Any suggestions? In my newbieness I have figured out how to record the file to a wav but when it comes to converting to an mp3 there are lots of programs out there but I have no idea which to pick. SInce it looks like i have to pay for them I figure I may as well get some advice first. OR am I totally missing something and is there some magic program that can take my music tracks off cassete and to mp3 or better compression without doing a wav file first???
no you do need to record in to an uncompressed format (wav) first, then you can convert. if you already have you tape recorded onto your computer into wav format, then all you need is a converter such as dBPowerAMP (http://www.dbpoweramp.com/). It is free and very easy to use. Note that the mp3 encoder it comes with is only a trial version (I forget if it expires after a certain number of files, or after a certain time) so if you only have a few files to convert it should work fine. But if you intend to keep the program for future encoding, but sure to download and install the mp3 LAME codec from the codec section of that website, so that you have unrestricted mp3 encoding.
you seem to know your stuff: now I have a similar q: how can I convert .aa files, as in the audio book I have purchased, to a compressed 1-CD size so that I can listen to a whole book (now 5-hours = 5 CDS) (on my car music CD player) in one go without having to stop my car, go into the boot, shuffle CDS around etc ?
honestly not sure, I've never dealt with .aa files before, but there is a thread discussing it here: http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_jump.cfm/103313/1322314-42622
