Cassette tape to MP3?

My wife has a huge cassette tape collection that she wants to transfer to her Apple iPod MP3 player. Can anybody advise on how we would go about this?

Do we somehow need to get the songs onto CD first? I could then load them via my iTunes software on my iBook.

I have a cassette deck on my stereo. Is it as simple a matter as plugging a CD recorder into this?

The staff at PCWorld didn't have a clue...

Regards
Jono

 

Unfortunatly you cant just plug your cd writer into your cassette deck.
You firstly need to convert the analouge signal from your cassettes into digital. The easiest way to do this is, plug in your cassette deck into the audio input on your sound card using a phono into 3.5mm miniplug. Then use software that records the input and converts into PCM (cd audio). This will use ALOT of space, but then after you have copied them to your Hard drive, you can send them straight into your ipod. This is time consuming. But thats is only way.

Im not familier with the ipod, so im not sure if it can record analogue signals straight onto its hard drive, using an input. Like a Minidisc recorder.

 

There are various ways of doing this.
One is as you say to record to CD then import the files through itunes and convert to mp3 that way.

A better way would be to plug the cassette deck directly into the mac and record the sound through something like Sound Edit or Peak.

The problem with either way is that you end up with one long track for each side of the tape.

You can sort this by either recording them into the mac one at at time or chopping them up with the software afterwards.

It's a good idea to normalise the tracks too, so you don;t get a CD or load of files with different levels.

Try macinstruct or a similar site for more details.

I've done the same from vinyl like this and it works pretty well.