Ripping From Cassettes

[darkewolf]

Just curious if anybody else does this. I run a cable from the stereo to the mic jack on the back of the comp, to record some of the songs off of old tapes. Stuff that dont turn up in the searches, or stuff that I dont think ever made it to CD, either cause they were from local bands, or they were outta print when CD's came out.
sound aint that great, and they take a lot of editing to get them to sound decent, but at least I can burn them back to plastic.

[Adster]

no coz it souds like shit

[cosmic doobie]

HMmm unless you are using sound editing and mastering to digital i.e. Soundforge or the like it really is a waste of disk space IMHO :D

[Skillian]

Yeah, I have done this with some live jungle tapes that were slowly deteriorating and would have been lost forever if I hadn't ripped them. It's an excellent way of archiving your old cassettes.

If you're sharing stuff that is available literally nowhere on mp3 (as long as you mark it as ripped from cassette) then you're doing a service and prolonging the life of that music.

If you get close to matching the quality of the tape, maybe even improve them by reducing some hiss then you're doing well.

Listening to music is sometimes more important than worrying about the quality... :rolleyes:

[Gutter]

I've got a Talent Scam Demo tape I need to get on my HD

and I have seen quiet a few Cassette rips on soulseek and they are labeled "Cassette Rip"

such a nice community we have ^_^

[pusher]

I have with a few live recordings I taped off the radio a few years back. But I haven't recently.

[darkewolf]

keeping some of those old songs alive really is part of the reason that I do it. also because yeah, the tapes are wearing out.
I use goldwave for my editing on them, when I do it, and it takes me anywhere from 30-90 minutes of work to get 1-3 songs (depending on what shape the tape was in) up to a shareable level of quality.
yeah, that hiss is a major pain in the butt! getting rid of all of it usually means filtering in a lot more treble, and then the singer sounds like he's coming out of one of those little walkman plug-in speakers while the rest of the band is playing on a regular one.
needless to say, I dont do it often...it IS a lot of effort, and time.

radio recordings is another thing. my sister-in-law's step dad does the reverse. he listens to this radio station from italy, over the internet. pipes the sound out from his laptop to the stereo and records the stuff to tape, so he can listen to it in his car.