[Techtalk] Audio tape to mp3 conversion

[Alvin Goats]

It's a multi-step process, but I use this to take LP/45 vinyl (the OLD
phonogragph records) to tape, then to my PC, then to CD tracks and
onwards to CD's and mp3's....


I'll list it all just in case someone wants to go that one extra step or
two to make CD's or mp3's from their (or the parents/grandparents)
record collection.

1)  Record the music to cassette tape. If you have a 78 RPM record and a
turntable capable of 45 or 33 1/3 RPM, note what speed you used to
record at.

2)  Use a stereo to stereo male connector to connect the cassette deck
to your computer's LINE IN jack. 

3)  I use grecord (gnome record) to record the sound to the PC. 90
minute tapes will give about a 750 Mbyte file, both sides. If you
installed kde and gnome, you can run grecord from kde or any other
window manager.

4)  Download a program called "gramofile". It will search the huge wav
file looking for quiet areas and louder areas of the sound. It takes a
little playing around, but it will help split the sound up into the
different tracks. If you have to, it will allow you to manually set
where to split the sound up based on a start and stop time of the
normally played back sound file. Work with it until you have the sound
split into the correct number of tracks and the correct start/stop of
each sound piece.

5)  If the sound quality needs to be improved, i.e. a scratchy record or
lots of hiss from the tape, download gwc (gnome wave cleaner). It does
some really great noise removal! I took my 1962 Peter, Paul and Mary LP
that was heavily used and cleaned it up to nearly ADD CD quality (Audio
Master-Digital-Digital Disk). 

6)  At this point, you will have multiple wav files that you can burn to
CD (remember to pad the sound files so they get written to disk
properly) or to encode to mp3, ogg or whatever.

I use bladeenc which works well for me. To encode everything to mp3:

bladeenc -QUIET *.wav


Does this help?

Alvin