converting cassettes to mp3

[kschwi]

I know someone who is having difficulty converting his old cassette recordings of baseball games to mp3. He says his conversion efforts so far sound "like it was recorded in a closet or underwater"(I'm not sure what converter he is using but I will ask.) He thinks there is too much treble sound and it may be due to the fact his cassette player doesn't have any treble or bass controls. Any thoughts?

Thanks,

Karl

[FulciLives]

We need a lot more information than that in order to help.

Some things would be:

1.) What type of player unit is he using
2.) How is #1 connected to the computer
3.) What software is he using to record with and into what format (i.e., should probably be recording to WAV then later on he can convert to MP3)

There are other things I can think of too like, for instance, can he play the tapes back OK with his setup and do they sound OK over the computer speakers or does direct playback like that already sound "weird" or is it only when he plays back the recordings?

The more info the better.

Right now there just isn't enough info in your post for anyone to really offer any real help specific to his situation.

[johns0]

Too much treble can be that Dolby is turned off in playback on a dolby recorded tape and sounding like underwater can be the playback head is dirty and/or out of alignment with that tape,as FulciLives has stated we need more info on the sound procession.

[Cornucopia]

Also, that "underwater" sound is very often an indicator of too low of a bitrate. Something tells me this was encoded to stereo, eh? I bet it shouldn't be. How many baseball broadcasts are truly in stereo? So encode it correctly as mono (single channel) and keep the bitrate the same. This is the equivalent of DOUBLING the bitrate. Boom - "underwater" gone.

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I also agree with the above posts about correctly capturing & pre-processing/noise-reducing the WAV file prior to encoding to mp3.

Scott

[AlanHK]

The connectors are important. Does the deck have RCA output or are you using headphone?
If the latter, too high a volume can make it distorted, too low and you get hiss.

Input to PC? If you're using a microphone socket, adjust the input volume similarly to avoid distortion and noise.
-- just play it till you get it right rather than record at first.

The cables can pick up hum. I ended up using a laptop on battery to avoid power hum when using AC. Maybe quality shielded cables would help.

If you just want to record and that's all, MP3DirectCut can very efficiently encode directly to MP3 at specified bitrate.

If you want to run any filters (cleaning noise) use Audacity, capture then process then save to MP3.