I have a bit of a different twist to my predicament. Many years ago I copied a vinyl recording of a righteous school Christmas concert my daughter was in to cassette. It was a performance between 5 school choirs...over 200 kids in all were singing...and it had members of the Denver Symphony to help the school orchestra along. It's a really nice album. Anyhow, I can't get it copied to my computer for transfer to CD. Out of the box retail cassettes record fine. (By "fine", I mean it works. I haven't even attempted separating tracks or anything like that yet. lol!) At first I thought maybe it had to do with recording vinyl to cassette. But I've also tested a backup cassette that was copied from a retail cassette. That doesn't work either. I'm just using my portable combination Radio/CD/Cassette player here at my computer. Is it possible that I can get the concert on my pc and then to CD if I move my cassette to cassette deck from the stereo system in the living room in here and hook it up? Or do 'second hand' cassettes just not work at all regardless of their original source? In reality, I'm just hoping I just need a better software program or a codec or two to accomplish this. (I've tried Audacity and the Windows Sound Recorder so far.) The idea of pulling the deck in here is not something I'm looking forward to. It took me forever to hook up the TV, cassette player, vhs player, cd player, and then later the dvd player, to our sound system and get it to all come out right. I'm too old for all this. Thanks in advance for any advice you can give me.
It's been awhile, but hopefully you haven't had to lug your equipment next to the computer. From what I understand, this isn't your first time doing cassette>PC>CD. I don't see how (something recorded on) a blank cassette would be any different! If it's just a recorded-cassette problem, I don't know what to say. I did one before, and I didn't do anything special.
Hi, thanks for getting back. I finally got the sound to come through using stereo mix instead of Line-in. (I didn't know other inputs could be tried instead of line-in.) Using the mic worked too but the background noise was awful. Go figure why line in wouldn't work with a cassette copy but would work with an original (retail) cassette. Once I got that figured out I became emboldened and tried some audio editing to get out some of the scratches and pops. A friend had an old version of Steinberg Clean that I could try. I also tried WaveLab. Both programs have some auto-cleaning settings I could try since I know nothing about doing it manually. Both sounded like the noise was improved as I listened to the playback after each change, but the saved file always sounded just the same as before. I gave up on that after about a week and just copied it as-is to CD for now. I have a friend in the UK who does a lot of audio work. I'm sending the cassette to him and he said he'd work on it for me. There is no hurry...I've waited 30+ years to get it cleaned up so another few months won't matter. He can work on it when he has nothing better to do. Thanks for the compliment too, but no, this was my very first attempt at this.
