Baktrack FREE FOR ALL CHALLENGE

To record an MP3 from a cassette tape:

There are many ways to do this. By far the easiest, most time efficient and with the method most specifically designed for the task is with baktrack. Baktrack takes three steps which add up to about 5 minutes to set up. It will automatically separate your tracks. You can combine, split tapes add mp3 data like artist name, song title etc. Convert your cassettes to mp3 with baktrack here. http://www.baktrack.com. Follow the three simple steps.
Using Music Match you’ll need 45 minutes and a lot of unneeded effort with poor results.

* Cassette player
* About 1MB of disk space for every minute of audio you need to record
* MusicMatch Jukebox

So you have traded in your Walkman for a newfangled transportable MP3 player, but you are hate to leave behind your favourite mixed tapes. Or possibly you have got some rare recordings on cassette & you don’t need to lose them to the ravages of time–it sure could not hurt to immortalize them digitally. Whatever your reason might be, making an MP3 file from a cassette recording can be a simple & painless technique, in the event you follow these clear directions.
Necessary Attention Span: 45 minutes

Encode Normalized MP3s
Step One
Connect your cassette player’s output to the line-in jack of your sound card using any combination of cables & adapters that do the job. For a standalone cassette player, they recommend using a simple cable with headphone & 1/8-inch stereo plugs on both ends. If your cassette deck is part of a stereo technique, use the headphone output with the same cable mentioned above; you will probably need a big-to-small adapter to pull this off. With either technique, make sure that bass, treble, & loudness levels are all set to zero.
Step Four
Before commencing the technique, you’ll be wanting to perform some basic tests. Set the player or receiver’s volume control at about 1/3 power. Then double-click the speaker icon on your taskbar. Make sure your Line In slider is all the way up & that the Mute box is not checked.
Step Four
Now, it is time to generate your check file. Open MusicMatch Jukebox (currently CNET’s Editors’ Choice for an encoder). First go to Options, then to Recorder. Next, go to Source, & pick Line In. Finally, go to Options, Recorder, then Quality, & pick MP3 (128 kbps). Press Play on the cassette deck & the Record button in the top left pane of MusicMatch. Wait until the indicator at the bottom of the MusicMatch window shows around 30 seconds of audio, then press Cease on the application.
Step Four
Find the check file in your MusicMatch Rips listing, which is probably on your desktop. In the event you cannot find the audio, click the Windows Start Menu, then Find File, & search for a file called line in track 01.mp3. Double-click the file to listen to it along with your default MP3 player. If it is soft, turn up your cassette player’s volume knob; if it is loud & distorted, turn the volume down. Then, return to Step Four & generate another check file. Four times this file sounds OK, proceed to Step Four.
Step Four
This is the simple part–just do everything you did to make the check file, only continue for the period of the cassette. Four tips on this:

* In MusicMatch, Press Cease after each song & Record before the beginning of the next one (while the cassette is still walking). This is the simplest way to finish up with separate MP3s of each tune.
* Make sure you have at least 1MB of disk space for each minute on the cassette deck. Check this by double-clicking My Computer, right-clicking the C: drive, & selecting Properties from the drop-down menu.

This is a great time to be a Deadhead. Finding Grateful Dead tapes is easier than ever. What used to take hours of work can now be accomplished with the click of a mouse button.
For those of you who have tons of tapes and want to convert to mp3 you can use www.baktrack.com to convert all your great live shows easily!

There are many ways to get your fix of Grateful Dead tunes online. Here’s just a few of them:

* Buy the official releases and download the audio files straight from Amazon.com or receive the actual cds through snail-mail. (Highly recommended!)
* Listen to music streams from the Live Music Archive as well as Wolfgang’s Vault or you could tune into GD internet radio.
* Download mp3 files from the Live Music Archive or from the band’s official website. (But please don’t trade them!)
* Download lossless files using a bittorrent tracker. (My favorite!)

Tape Trading The Old Fashioned Way
Mark Mcue’s master Grateful Dead tapes. Photo taken by Alex Ford.

Back in the day collecting Grateful Dead tapes was very time consuming. First you had to find someone willing to make copies for you or let you borrow them to do it yourself. Most people were very reluctant to lend out their high quality tapes for fear they would never be seen again. So you had to go buy some blank tapes to give them and then wait for them to find time to dub them for you. If they didn’t live nearby you had to use snail-mail to send them out and then patiently wait for them to return. If you didn’t know the person you were trading with you just had to have faith that they would actually return them at all.

Fortunately, most Deadheads are kind and honest folks. Many would even make tapes for newbies who had nothing to trade if they just sent them blank tapes and return postage. That’s where the term B+P (blanks and postage) comes from, which you’ll often hear in tape trading circles.

The actual act of dubbing cassette tapes takes quite a bit of time itself. Most collectors didn’t like using the high speed dubbing option found on many tape decks because it could degrade sound quality. So copying a 90 minute tape takes just that – 90 minutes. That’s just the first set of a Dead show! So you usually need two tapes minimum, 45 minutes per side. This can become tedious pretty quickly, especially if you’re a hardcore taper like many heads that obsessively collected thousands of shows. Quality blank tapes like the Maxell XL-II’s preferred by most tapers were not cheap either. So, over time you’re talking about a major investment here.

Tape Trading In The New Millenium
The Maxell commonly used for Grateful Dead tapes.

But the growth of personal computers with high speed internet access has changed all that, just as it’s changed so many other things in our lives. Our Grateful Dead “tapes” aren’t really even tapes anymore. Analog cassette tapes have gone they way of the dinosaurs.

For the 30 year history of the band analog magnetic tape was the primary media used for making concert recordings. So we still call them “Grateful Dead tapes” because that’s what we’re used to saying even though the term is no longer technically correct. Magnetic tape is rarely used for recording at all anymore, the possible exception being reel to reel decks used in professional recording studios. Nowadays we use digital mediums like CDs, DVDs, lossless FLAC files, and computer hard drives.

It used to take 3 hours to dub a show with cassette tapes and each time you copied a tape it degraded the sound quality. Now we can make a bit-perfect copy of a show in about 15 minutes at 5 minutes per CD! Even better, once the analog master tape has been transferred to computer hard drive, you can do just about whatever you want with it. Like instantly share it with thousands of other people through the use of file sharing programs like bittorrent.

Obviously this has taken Grateful Dead tape trading to a whole new level!

Digital Archiving
Bob Weir in the Grateful Dead tapes vault

The other great thing about transferring tapes to the digital realm and sharing them with people is that it creates a permanent archive of that recording that could theoretically last forever. Cassette tapes physically decompose pretty quickly unless stored in a controlled environment, so eventually all those master recordings will be lost.

If you love this music as much as I do then that’s a very disturbing thought.

The master copy (meaning the original recording itself) is the one you want to preserve because every time you copy a tape it degrades the sound quality until it reaches the point where they become unlistenable. So a second generation tape (a copy of a copy) won’t sound nearly as good as the master and anything after that will have a lot of hiss.

But digital copies don’t degrade in this manner. And if you have that perfect digital copy of the master tape residing on thousands of different computers all over the world, chances are good that the recording will never be completely lost. I don’t think the internet is ever going away, unless humans become extinct, and in that case we won’t need our Grateful Dead tapes anymore anyway!

WHAT YOU NEED TO CONVERT LP TO CD:

1. A tape deck or record player with an "an audio out" (a line-out or headphone slot would do!).
2. An RCA to headphone cable (to connect your tape deck to your computer’s sound card).

Converting Lps to mp3 for cd is easiest with backtrack.com. It requires no software installation and will automatically separate your tracks

Learn to convert LP to CD or audio cassette tapes to CD!
To transfer vinyl LP records to CD or audio cassettes to CD, you will need to take a couple of easy steps.

Converting Lps to mp3 for cd is easiest with backtrack.com. It requires no software installation and will automatically separate your tracks

OR IF YOU WANT TO USE ACOUSTICA SPIN IT AGAIN
3. Items from 1 and 2 and Acoustica Spin It Again software to extract the music from the tape/LP and save it onto your computer, MP3 player or CD.

Record your old 45 and 33 LPs to CD or to your new MP3 player!Convert your recordings to MP3s or burn them on to an audio CD! Spin It Again is a dedicated LP and tape recording conversion software application designed to make the process as simple as possible. …more… This dedicated LP and tape recording software makes it child’s play to record and edit your old albums. The wizard driven process guides you through connecting your hardware, getting the correct recording level, and splitting your recording into multiple tracks. The software automatically removes clicks and pops and that unwanted tape hum and hiss.

Simple steps using Acoustica Spin It Again to convert your LP records and tapes to CD (or LP to MP3)

Step 1: Hookup Your Record Or Cassette Player To Your Computer

One of the biggest stumbling blocks to recording your LPs and cassettes to CD is how to hook up your record player or cassette player to your computer’s sound card. Luckily, Acoustica Spin It Again software has a guide that helps you make the connection.

Run Acoustica Spin It Again and click "Hookup Wizard". It will guide you through a series of questions and show you photos and images to help you hook up your record or cassette player to your computer.

To start, you will first need to connect your stereo system to your computer with a stereo RCA-to-headphone cable. One end of this cable should be connected to your tape deck’s line-out, and the other end should be plugged into the line-in of your sound card (1/8" hole). This cable is available for just a few dollars at Radio Shack or any audio component store.

If that doesn’t help you make the hookup, here are some more tips:

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You will probably need to purchase the right kind of cable from an electronics or audio store such as Radio Shack, Best Buy, The Good Guys, etc. Support your local "Mom & Pop" family audio store, if possible! The cables usually cost less than $5.
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Your sound card will require an eighth inch stereo mini plug on one side.
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Use a flashlight to look at the line in port of your computer’s sound card.
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The sound card’s line-in looks like an arrow going into a speaker.
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If you are connecting your stereo amp to your computer, you will probably need an RCA to an eighth inch stereo mini.
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You can usually hook up your tape/cassette player directly to your computer’s sound card.
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Record players have an extra low level and usually need to go into the Phono In on a stereo amp or through a preamp before going into the computer’s sound card.
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If you don’t have an RCA jack on the back of your device, you can still hook it up from the headphone jack of your record player or tape player. You’ll need a special cord that goes from a quarter inch stereo jack to an eighth inch stereo mini.
*

You may need to purchase a new record player or cassette deck.

Step 2: Get A Good Recording Level

The first time you run the software, it will ask you if you want to run the "Recording Level Wizard". Click "Yes" or click "Level Wizard"

Once the wizard starts, click the "Start" button and follow the instructions. (It will have you play the loudest part of the record or tape.)

Step 3: Click "Record"

If you are recording a tape, make sure to rewind it. Click "Record" and start playing your record or tape. Once it is done, flip over the record or tape and play side two. When it’s finished, click "Next" or "Stop".

Step 4: Preview And Edit Your Recording

The software automatically splits your recording up into tracks. If there were any erroneous tracks created or if there was extra silence, you can edit it by clicking "Split" and/or by dragging the track markers.

Once you are satisfied, click "Next"

Step 5: Tag / Name Your Recording

Enter in the artist, album, genre and track names if your CD burner supports burning CD-Text. (This screen is more important when creating MP3s or other audio files.)