Kevin's Watch

I have everything ripped to my computer / ipod, and it was finally time. I'm moving across the country in a couple of weeks, and just couldn't find a reason to lug another 6 boxes around when I haven't touched the discs in at least couple of years. They went to a good home - a friend of my wife's daughter... I got to turn a 21 year old kid onto a whole lot of great music. He came over wearing a Hendrix shirt, but still he has no idea what he's gotten himself into

But still, a part of my heart ached... those cds were my personal possessions, they had artwork, I could hold them in my hand. I can listen to any song instantly, but have no liner notes, and what album covers I have are mostly little 1 inch squares that I don't even see since the ipod is in the glove box. Even though I rarely play the cd's and have been using an ipod for years, I still had the them...

Anyone else had a similar experience?

I'd be too afraid my iPod would get lost or stolen and I'd just simply be out.

Currently, I'm working on getting rid of all of my records. I've got a turntable and putting them on my computer to burn off when I can. Whew, what an undertaking! I'm not doing them all, but I have a lot of good stuff. I took about half of them to the store in town that buys records. I got $50 trade for it, so I picked up a few CDs I've been meaning to buy for a while. And they only picked up about half of them. Which sucks. I still have one more full milk crate to go before I'm done.

Next: Tapes!

Make sure that you have a backup.

Cagliostro wrote:
Next: Tapes!

I've been looking for a way to rip my cassettes to my computer - so far haven't found the right cable I guess. Do you know what equipment I need to do this?

My CDs are long ago ripped to my computer - just haven't forced myself to dump the originals yet

You should just be able to use a cable that has 2 RCA-type plugs on one end and a headphone jack on the other. That end plugs into your computer's input jack. Try this, but you should be able to find it for less at Radio Shack or Best Buy (if you're in the US). Or try Newegg.com.

www.amazon.com/dp/B0040J4V1G/ref=asc_df ... B0040J4V1G

I have a cable like that - and I thought it should work. Maybe I didn't have something configured right in my recording software...

Also check the settings under "Recording devices" in Windows. (or whatever it would be called on a Mac). Right-click the volume icon in the taskbar to get to it.

I still have a box of tapes I intend to convert someday too...

I can't do it. I haven't bought a CD in ages, but then again there hasn't been one that I've wanted for a while. Now I'm at the point that there's one that I want, and I don't know what to do.

I want the new Maiden album. I can't see buying it on CD since I'll rip it and never use it again. Then again, I can't come to grips with paying $10 for the download (nothing physical).

$10? That's about as much as I paid for the actual CD. I keep it in the CD player of my car, in case the batteries on my phone/MP3 player are running low.

Personally, I'm finding CDs a bit of a hassle...and I don't even have that many! But I hold onto them any way as a sort of hard-backup copy and to prove to folks that I do buy music legitimately.

Well, since I have close to 200 cassettes with music that I want to save, I ended up buying one of these:

www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0038OLL2Q/ref=oss_product

Plugs into a USB port and lets you bring the music into an editing program (I use Audacity, which is free). It also comes with a program that loads the music directly into iTunes, but it messes up sometimes and splits a song when it shouldn't, so I'm using Audacity.

Works slick. Just plug this in, pop in a tape and hit play. Set Audacity to do a timed recording (long enough to get the whole tape), and it does the whole tape, front and back. Use Audacity to split the file up into individual songs and export them to mp3 and you can adjust for any random noises or eliminate long gaps, whatever. I love it so far!

I believe this same company makes a USB turntable also.

Yeah, I have the turntable version from them. The "automagic" software that splits songs sucks, and I could not find a way to hear the music while recording, which meant if the album skipped, I couldn't tell very easily. That was pretty unusable software, but it also came with Audacity, which is pretty good. Since it was a demo version, it did not have the ability to normalize or turn up the volume. Thankfully, I have an old full version of Sound Forge (to which I think Audacity is the latest software from the same company, or at least is very similar), but unfortunately I cannot pull the music from the turntable straight to Sound Forge. So, I record it quietly to Audacity, do all my edits, save it off as a .wav file, then open it in Sound Forge, normalize it and prepare it for eventual burning. It's a pain, but it is working, and I'm pleased it is doing so.
I'm glad you showed that to me, as I recently discovered my old tape deck has bit the big one. I was thinking of running by some pawn shops to look for a new one, but it might just make more sense to go this route, as it is fairly inexpensive. And it's nice to see it does front and back.
I probably should just look into how much the full version of Audacity costs, but...I dunno...it's just a couple extra steps.
Does it record at a decent volume on the cassette version?

Audacity is free - audacity.sourceforge.net/ I am using the 1.3.12 beta and it seems to be working fine.

As for the volume, I've noticed the sound is noticeably lower when a song that I've recorded from tape comes up on my iPod. I don't know if there's something I can do to boost the sound level when converting it to mp3 or what... haven't had a chance to play with that yet. I have the input levels as high as possible in Audacity without clipping. I am not a sound engineer by any means - before this week I'd never even heard of some of the terms I'm seeing now - so there may be a way to fix that, not sure

Do you have a "normalize" function on your version? Mine is greyed out until I purchase the full version. If it works the same as Sound Forge, then you can adjust the dB to louder when normalizing a sound file. Once you get that set, it's just as easy as clicking that to raise the levels. I find it works pretty good. But unfortunately, there are a lot of options greyed out on my Audacity. Which means you need to pay for the full version, which makes me bitter.

You might want to look at a program called Replay Gain too. It normalizes the volume of your mp3s without having to re-edit them in Audacity or Sound Forge. Great for all the ones you already have, or that you download from iStore or wherever. It takes a while if you have a lot of music but you can set a normalized level and it encodes something in the mp3 tag that says how much to boost (or cut, if a track is really loud) each track... so, it doesn't actually change the sound file itself. This is also good because you can undo it if you want. IIRC you can choose either normalizing for each song individually, or by album, which means that a quiet track on a given album will still be quiet when compared to the rest of the album, but the whole album will be normalized to the level you selected. Hope that made sense. Think of like an album of classical music where there's a quiet interlude. You don't want it to be as loud as the rest...

(jeez, I sound like I work for them )

btw, I still use Sound Forge 4.5 which is from like 1999... but it does everything I want except save as mp3.

Another excellent program I use is dbPoweramp to convert between flac, wav, and mp3. I think the full version also includes ReplayGain as a plugin (or "effect") but I haven't used it there.

Cagliostro wrote:Do you have a "normalize" function on your version? Mine is greyed out until I purchase the full version. If it works the same as Sound Forge, then you can adjust the dB to louder when normalizing a sound file. Once you get that set, it's just as easy as clicking that to raise the levels. I find it works pretty good. But unfortunately, there are a lot of options greyed out on my Audacity. Which means you need to pay for the full version, which makes me bitter.

I am confused. Audacity is free... there is nothing greyed out on my copy.

I downloaded it directly from the page I linked earlier. You can even download the source and modify it if you wanted; it's open source software.

I'll check it out to see if there's a normalize function.

*edit* Ok, I just checked. There is a normalize function in Audacity. I will play around with it this weekend and see if that helps.

Cool. I used the version from the disk that came with the turntable, so I'll try downloading it from the site. Thanks for the tip. Now I'll probably be able to save a step.

Why in the world would you get rid of your CDs?? You all actually listen to music on your computer? Or worse ... an MP3 player??

How do you listen to music in your car?

How do you listen to music on your--you know--stereo? Do you have your computer hooked up to your stereo?

Music was not meant to be heard on computer speakers! Or ear buds! I have a nice pair of headphones that I use when working, but when I want to sit down and relax on my couch and blare some floor shaking tunes, I have to have the CD.

I can't listen to any lossy format. I don't understand how people can tolerate compression. Cymbals that sound like aluminum foil? No thanks. Bass that sounds like a cardboard box? No way.

When I want a music experience, I turn on my record player

MP3s aren't too bad, except for if you have to use a radio transmittor to listen to in the car, at that point you reeeeally need to crank up the volume.

Okay, I downloaded the version of Audacity you recommended, and yes, while a bit clunkier than Sound Forge (mainly because they give more options that I don't really want), it works and is lovely. Thanks for letting me know this. You will be saving me a heap of time in the future to finish this project up. I wonder why they gave such a crappy version of it with the turntable.

Just an update for anyone else reading this thread in the future.

I got the volume boosted in the cassettes I am recording. Once I record the files into Audacity from the USB tape drive, I can go to Effect->Equalize and boost the entire recorded track. I've been using about 3.0-4.0 db boost and that is making the exported mp3 files sound really close to the same volume as other music in iTunes and on my iPod, without any noticeable distortion.

Now I just gotta work through a stack of ~200 cassettes