The Tapedrop Chronicles Continued

The Tapedrop Chronicles- The Tools Of The Trade-off

OK, so you want to know more about transferring cassettes to CD and or digital back-ups. Good; you came to the right place.

First off, you will need the following:

• a cassette player with some sort of audio out capability,
• a way to carry the sound from your cassette player to your recorder,
• a recording device like a computer or stand-alone CD recorder.

Back in the old days, I had a very nice stereo Magnavox clock radio that had a cassette player and a headphone jack. I bought one of those cables at Radio Shack that had a male stereo plug on both ends. One end was connected to the clock radio and the other was plugged into the Aux In jack on my computer. It did very well for it's time, but in my travels, this magnificent clock radio has been lost. Luckily, I had a component stereo stored at my brother's place...

...or so I thought. While I was in Europe, my brothers got rid of my stereo receiver and speakers. Crap. Those speakers were custom made by an old college classmate and sounded better than anything I heard in a similar price range. The receiver was no big deal; I had since replaced it with a home theater system. My brother did have the cassette deck, so I made sure I got that before it mysteriously disappeared.

My current setup includes that Pioneer CT-W503R dual cassette deck. It has a large headphone jack, but I preferred to go with the red and white RCA cables in the back of the tape deck. To finish off the connection, I used a stereo RCA jack-to-male stereo plug. Naturally, the headphone plug is connected to the computer's AUX IN jack.

Now that you kind of have an idea of how the connections are made, we can discuss the software I use to record the sound from the tape deck onto the computer...but that is for another time...