My wife is a singer, and she wants to take some of her old cassette tapes
and move the songs to CDs, and we don't know how to go about that. She has
purchased Pyro 2004, which hopefully handles the software part of it, but
how do we go from the tape player, which has phono jacks to the sound card,
which doesn't? The salesman at Best Buy sold my wife a $40 set of cables,
but they are phone jack only, so can't be used unless I get an adaptar of
some sort, I guess.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Jack

Jack Bruss wrote:
> My wife is a singer, and she wants to take some of her old cassette tapes
> and move the songs to CDs, and we don't know how to go about that. She has
> purchased Pyro 2004, which hopefully handles the software part of it, but
> how do we go from the tape player, which has phono jacks to the sound card,
> which doesn't? The salesman at Best Buy sold my wife a $40 set of cables,
> but they are phone jack only, so can't be used unless I get an adaptar of
> some sort, I guess.
>
> Any advice would be appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Jack
>

The cable you need has a 1/8" stereo phone plug on one end, and two RCA
plugs on the other. You would then connect the phone plug into the line
in of your sound card.

I don't know enough about Pyro to tell you whether it will record from
the line in. If not, you can download a pretty good free program at
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
Whatever program you use, make sure you record in the .wav format and
not .mp3. That way, you'll get the best quality.

You can get a cable with two rca phono jacks for the tape unit
and a 1/8 stereo plug jack on the sound card. Best Buy should
take the cable you bought back and get you the correct one.

Does Pyro record from the line in? You might consider a software
package like Steinberg's Clean that will record the analog audio
from tape, eliminate some of the hiss, normalize the sound level,
and break it into 'songs' according to the silence gaps or where
you want the breaks, then burn an audio cd. Clean was designed
to convert tapes and LPs into audio CDs. I only paid $10 for
Clean when it was on sale at Guitar Center.

With digital recording you don't want to saturate the input, you
never want to go into the red. Unlike analog recording where there
is some headroom for minor excursion above 0db, digital recording
recording is unforgiving when you go above 0db, it like truncates
the numbers, makes it sound awful. So you want to record safely
down at -3 to -6db. But if you burn an audio cd at this level it
will be quiet compared to your other cds. What normalizing will
do is find the peak in the recording, raise that 0db and raise the
rest of the song by the same amount.

Thanks,
Jeff Sandys

Jack Bruss wrote:
>
> My wife is a singer, and she wants to take some of her old cassette tapes
> and move the songs to CDs, and we don't know how to go about that. She has
> purchased Pyro 2004, which hopefully handles the software part of it, but
> how do we go from the tape player, which has phono jacks to the sound card,
> which doesn't? The salesman at Best Buy sold my wife a $40 set of cables,
> but they are phone jack only, so can't be used unless I get an adaptar of
> some sort, I guess.
>
> Any advice would be appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Jack