Copying audio from cassette

If you’re looking to include audio from your old archive of cassettes in your podcast, you need to find a way to get the audio copied over to your PC.

You may be able to connect the audio output of a cassette machine to a “line in” socket on your computer’s soundcard, but this is often tricky, and there may be an issue with sound quality. A better option may be to use a dedicated audio cassette player that connects to your computer using USB.

One product that’s worth a look is the Tape 2 PC desktop USB cassette player, available from Maplin and Play.com. Pictured below, this has two cassette drives, for dual-dubbing, and you can connect it either to a computer for archiving, or to your hi-fi for playback of cassettes on a home audio system. It comes with software to allow easy conversion to MP3 and WAV formats.

Tape 2 PC Cassette Drive

As an alternative, there’s the ION Tape Express, which in our experience is less good, but does the job. This is a Walkman-sized cassette player that runs on batteries. It has auto-reverse so that you can dub both sides of a cassette in one go, and has a headphone socket so you can use it as a portable cassette player. Tape Express is available from I want One Of Those and Maplin.

Tape Express Cassette Converter

If you’re only interested in transferring a handful of cassettes, the smaller Tape Express  will do the job, but the “Tape 2 PC” makes for a better tool if you have lots of cassettes to archive.

The Record U Option

There’s one other product that can be very handy for converting audio tapes (including micro cassettes), as well as converting your old vinyl. A product called Record U is a small box that connects to your computer’s USB and allows you to connect an existing player (a hi-fi cassette deck, Walkman, dictation machine, record deck, etc). This can be very handy if you have a recorder or player, and just want to transfer off audio into a digital format.

The Record U has two phono sockets, and a Recording Volume control, so that you can adjust the levels that get recorded onto your machine.

Record U Media Converter for converting tape and vinyl

The Record U is available from Firebox and Maplin

Recording Software

As one of our commenters suggests below, once the cassette audio has been copied to your computer, you might want to use the Audacity package to “tidy up” the recordings – perhaps removing hiss and silence between tracks.