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Cassette to mp3 converter5/29/2023 ![]() It's up to you if it's acceptable or not. With poorer-quality cards, this will might have a bit of crosstalk. Since the tapes are mono, it would be almost trivial (with sox and a lot of scratch space, named pipes in real-time, or what have you) to record two at once, using the left and right channels of just one sound card. It'd be possible to save more time using multiple sound cards and tape decks, given some good organizational tactics. ![]() If the computer put up to the task isn't very fast, avoid VBR and other CPU-robbing features in the MP3 encoder to make sure that things don't get backlogged waiting to encode. ![]() This multitasking will allow the tape machine to stay busy. For example, if you record double-speed audio at 48KHz, tell the encoder that the file is 24KHz.Įncode the previous tape while you're recording the next. Next, lie to your MP3 encoder about the sampling rate - divide it by the playback speed. Any of these should be sufficient, with 96KHz being overkill for this application. Record at 44.1, 48, 96KHz, or whatever sampling rate floats your boat. IIRC, these can operate at 4x normal playback speed. These will have 1 playback compartment, and a number (from two to lots) of record wells. Tascam and others make decks intended for mass-duplication of cassettes. A machine already designed for high-speed dubbing would be ideal, as it makes the mods easier (just trick it into thinking a tape is present in the record well) and they sometimes have heads designed for playing very high-frequency sounds. ![]() I'll use this as a baseline for intelligibility, and thus assert that 4x playback would be fine on all but the rattiest tape machines.Īny good service tech will be able to modify a cheap tape deck to play at high-speed. I don't have much trouble understanding people on the phone. That said, Ma Bell doesn't think there's any useful information in the human voice outside of the band of 300-3,000Hz, so they limit telephone calls to these constraints. These things don't deal with high frequencies very well at normal playback speeds - let alone after frequencies double or quadruple with tape speed. The most unavoidable loss with high-speed playback of cassettes is that introduced by the tape deck's playback head. Alas, you failed to mention any budget or quality concerns. Since there are such huge quantities of material, I can only assume that quality is of little importance, as long as the end result is plain and intelligible. you could even use a network share and write a script to encode when a file isnt written to anymore.Įven better yet, find one big lecture class, and pass them out as extra credit, for anyone who'll rip them. as for the encoding, use some mass encoder. bind this to 4 keys, and you'll easily be able to control 4 streams.Īssuming that you have a thousand tapes, thats about 40 days worth of playtime, and so this method should take 1/4 to 1 day to complete the ripping. Or, you could set up a macro program, and bind one key to save an existing wave file, and open a new one. I recall either a built-in feature or some plugin that allows you to split a wave file into segments based on noise thresholds, just set this to maybe 30 seconds of silence to split the tracks up. make them listen continuously, each computer writing one big file for each stream.įind yourself 40 tape decks, and either use them at normal 1x speed, or use the above solution for cutting your sample rate in four to accomodate a 4x playback. now, run 4 copies of soundforge on each computer, each one listening to a different sound input channel. set up maybe 10 of them, each with 4 soundcards. To check your recording's quality I'd recommand baudline () maybe there are encoders that have an equalizer simmilar to the mp3-players? you may have to compensate these with some filters. Of course this totally ignores any frequency dependant effects in the path from the magnetic media to your computer. If it works out halfway useable then you could try and get one of those 96kHz/24Bit-soundcards, that should yield about 12kHz Bandwidth (96kHz recording, 24kHz encoding -> 12kHz BW) which should be more than what you could expect from a normal analog audio-tape. Of course that would limit your Bandwidth to about 5000 Hz but I'd give that method a try to check the feasibilty of that method. Now the encoded mp3 should have the correct speed and frequency again. wav file at 44100 Samples/sec and then encode it with your favourite mp3-encoder telling him that you have a 11025-Samples/sec (=44k1/4)recording. Then just grab the signal from the playback-deck and feed it in your soundcard. Then lets assume that your fast-dubbing-tapedeck runs at four times the normal speed. Let me assume that those lectures are not hi-fi recordings and as such you could live with half or a quarter of the audio-bandwidth of your soundcard.
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