What do I do with old audio cassette tapes?

Possible to convert songs to MP3 format?

[vibgyor79]

Before burning my collection of audio cassette tapes, I would like to convert a couple fo cassette tapes to digital format, preferably MP3. Is that possible?

I have a PC and cassette player/CD player (hi-fi system) with lots of audio ins, audio outs. What is the exact procedure to convert audio in cassette tapes to MP3 format? What are the tools required? How will the audio quality be?

[dingman]

All I can think of is to plug the line out from your tape player into the line in or microphone jack on your sound card, record the tape, and then use your favorite audion editor to break it up into tracks and convert those tracks to mp3. I used to do more or less the same thing to send audio letters and compose homework in audio format when I had my writing hand in a half-cast for tendonitis. It's a bit more work than ripping a CD, but not too hard.

[vibgyor79]

A dumb question :)
Which is my "favorite audio editor"?

Am I supposed to use Windows Sound Recorder?

[Josk]

Anything that can record samples. Then just convert to a mp3.

[dingman]

I used xwave and snd at various points. I think xwave has the same basic functionality as Windows Sound Recorder. It doesn't take much, really, since we're not talking about sophisticated mixing and effects generation.

[Iguana]

I find Goldwave is a pretty good sound file editor - but it is a bit slow when splitting up 45 mins of music into separate tracks.

There is CDWave that makes pretty good guesses as to where the tracks begin and end.

I think these are both shareware

[davaddavad]

hitsquad has tons of tools for audio even some specifically
for saving old lps and tapes hth dave