She Who Must Be Obeyed has quite a box full of her favorite music on cassettes. I think I have found cassette players with USB output, but what about software. Probably Audacity could handle the chore, but does anyone know of anything purpose-built for the task? I can use my Windows machine if I have to, but I’d rather not.
Thanks, and Happy New Year!
I’ve used audacity in the past, on Linux, to do just that…
~10 years ago my daughters got me a USB combo turntable / cassette player … it was AWFUL* at playing vinyl - but - I did use the cassette player to rip some cassettes to mp3 files…
I had a cassette somewhere with my youngest sister, when she was around 6 talking, but couldn’t find it anyway - but did manage to rip a cassette of some music and share it with my siblings…
I don’t use it any more… I’ve got a much better turntable - and - the whole purpose of having a turntable is so the audio isn’t mangled through a computer - analog → analog…
* and pretty shit quality - I left my original copy of Abbey Road on there for a month or so, and it melted / perished three circles from the rubber matter INTO the vinyl grooves on the LP!
@berninghausen
I just use YouTube and download any mp3 audio or mp4 video. Been down that road with Audacity, it works, but editing is a pain.
true… I did find some scripts and CLI stuff that could hunt and peck through audio streams (i.e. WAV files) for extended silence, and write a CUE file to break up the huge file into chunks per track… but either way - it was a tedious process!
Note also - I don’t feel the least bit of moral anguish, by saving myself time, and finding stuff I already own on vinyl, or cd, or cassette (and some cases ALL THREE) by clicking through to my friendly neighbourhood pir8 / torrent search engine…
In fact, it’s VASTLY easier than ripping a CD!
I only do this as an absolute LAST RESORT - because the audio quality is so shonky… but when I do - I use youtube-dl / yt-dlp. I do also use that to grab concerts - and often some kinda youtube-watcher has commented with start times for each track, and I can use that to compile a CUE sheet to break up the large ripped file, into separate tracks (I use “shnsplit” / shnsplt - I think the DEB in Ubuntu is “shntools” maybe?).
I also rip some more “obscure” stuff out of bandcamp (using something VERY similar to youtube-dl : bandcamp-download / bandcamp-dl) - for “evaluation” before I decide to buy - but - some major labels host their stuff in Bandcamp these days too - like Ipecac (Faith No More, but also soundtracks by Ennio Morricone) and Sonic Youth…
Thank you all for your suggestions. Amazon has inexpensive cassette players (remember the Walkman?) with USB output capability. Audacity will record just about anything that can be heard. I’ll consider this thread closed, unless someone has a brilliant last thought.
I’ve done choir recordings and old family tapes. Commercial music, unless it’s rare, is much better borrowed off the internet. I hooked up our best cassette deck to the line in on my PC, recorded full sides, then cut and labeled using OcenAudio or Audacity. Some family tapes were edited beyond that.
If you’re looking for better audio quality, you may want to consider this comment on the quality of modern cassette-to-usb converters. (Quote: “decent cassette playback units have not been manufactured in about two decades.”)