Transfer from old music casette to puter ?

[yrnehbad]

Tried a search but dont really know where to start. I want to put some "baby" music on a DVD slide show for my grand daughter. These are old (about 20 years) music cassetes. Can i feed this into my soundblaster card via a cable (RCA on one end and mini for sound card at other) from a boom box cassete player which has RCA out jacks at the rear ? I'm almost sure it is mono. TIA for any suggestions Yrnehbad

[Supreme2k]

Either that, or a 1/8" to 1/8" from the headphone jack to the line-in on the SB.

[JohnnyCNote]

I have a cassette deck sitting on top of my computer. I'd suggest using the line out from the source player. You can get a cable with RCA males on one end and a mini-stereo jack on the other, presuming that's what the line in on your sound card takes. The main thing to watch out for is too much gain when recording the music as it can cause distortion....

[yrnehbad]

Thank you for your input. Sorry i did not acknowledge sooner; have been away at cottage. yrnehbad

[Richard_G]

If the CD player you use has RCA out jacks they will almost certainly be at line level. If not at line level they will be at a fixed level and high impedance so will be a proper match for the Line In on your soundcard. Do not ever try and use a headphone output, the impedance and levels will be completely wrong (unless you are lucky when setting the output volume) and will almost certainly result in poor quality. If you are starting with cassette tapes the quality won't be brilliant in the first place so you want to avoid anything that is going to make it worse.

[Bodyslide]

you could also get this piece of equipment and you would be all set.

http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=PLUSDECK2-N&cpc=SCH&srm=0

[TheFamilyMan]

Something to consider is the audio quality of those 20 year old tapes. Once you got them on your computer, there are apps that can do wonders to remove hiss and spruce up the sound quality. Check the "audio editors" in this site's tools page. Also consider magix audio cleaning lab, which is not mentioned but available at amazon.com. One nice feature with most of these apps is that they have a recording GUI that takes the guess work out of setting the correct recording volume for your comptuer. The setup you've mentioned should work just fine.

Then again, if this is not a concern, at least you know....Good Luck!