

Listen for sounds other than the normal humming that playing a tape always produces to assess whether or not your other electronics are causing interference. To test the amount of noise your environment is producing, make sure there is no tape in your player, plug it into your computer, and start recording. Popping sounds and static are common in recordings that were done with their audio cable near power or RF sources.
Cassette player for a mac computer free#
To check, navigate in Windows to:Ĭontrol Panel > Sound > Recording > Right click Microphone > Properties > Advanced:Īn environment free from electrical noise – Recording cassettes is an analog process, so any interference from nearby electronics is picked up and recorded as audio. As long as you hear minimal noise (the less, the better), it should work fine.Īn appropriate sound card – You don’t need anything fancy, you just need to have a microphone jack on your computer.Īnything produced within the last few years should support stereo input at the same quality level as CDs. Listen for static or other strange sounds – every sound that the player makes in this process will be recorded into your digital file. To test, make sure that there is no media currently in the player, plug in some head phones, and press play. Just make sure that it doesn’t have any playback problems before you begin. Since they’re rarely produced now, you may find an old one that has seen better days. Those things are hard to come by nowadays, so you may have to settle for just about any cassette player you can get your hands on.

Ideally, you’ll want to use a high-quality tape deck. Tapes are especially susceptible to heat, dirt, and magnetism, so get them converted while you can. Keep in mind that the more you play a tape, the more its signal is degraded. If you need to rip an old cassette from an answering machine or handheld recorder, this is the ideal guide for you. There are definitely some albums in circulation that were only ever released on cassettes, but, when possible, ripping a CD is going to produce far better results. The media – You’ll obviously need a cassette or some variation (micro cassette, etc).
