story of how i converted cassette tapes to digital after 30 years

[blueagent004]

back in 1989 when i was in kindergarden my dad wanted me to learn about electronics, so he bought me a double decker cassette player with the ability to directly and noiselessly record from the built-in radio tuner, along with having a headphone jack, which i'd play around with.

by 1991 i'd use it to record tons and tons of J-POP and UK/US songs that were on the radio. i'd even invite my classmate friends to starred in our own home recording sessions where we talk about all the anime/j-drama we were into or biatch about all our recent happenings at school and which teacher we hated most.

afer accumulating close to a big box with more than 80 cassette tape recordings from 1990 to 2001. at the time my parents forced me to get rid of my tapes because it was taking up space in our apartment, so i went to various internet forums and asked if it was possible to hook my cassette player up to my pc, via the only port on the player which was the headphones port, then somehow transfer the audio to digital format on the pc. and here's what happened.

-i first went to an audiophile forum (don't remember what it was called) and an audio expert there told me that i can't hook my cassette player to my pc unless it has an Audio-Out port like a HI-FI stereo system does, and i need to buy an expensive sound card like the "sound blaster professional" which has AUDIO-IN port to hook up to the Hi-FI for cassette to digital transfer, and after all that i need to get some really expensive audio authoring software to capture the audio.

-later another person then chimed in on a different audio forum and claimed that i need professional audio recording equipment like what they used in a sound booth, he even showed me an image of what the consumer version of the thing looks like, it looked like a rectangular VCR box but twice its size and it had a crap load of Audio out ports and several big round turnable dails on the front. he said if i didn't atleast have that i can't transfer from cassette to digital.   


- finally i posted to a regular gaming forum, a bunch of stupid kids then ganged up on me quickly and screamed at me and said i was stupid because you cant hook a cassette player to the pc since they are "two different things" since a cassette player is not a computer. after that another guy ridiculed me and said "haha why you dont you try plugging a VGA cable to your cassette player moron!!!!!!" which led to the moderators immediately banning me for what they alleged was my deliberate attempt to start a flame war on the forums to "cause chaos", as they put it, by starting a ridiculous discussion on putting a cassette tape into the pc, which the pre-teen moderators claimed normal people with common sense would know as being impossible.

- after this i searched all over the internet using LYCOS and Altavista and Yahoo, but could find no information about transferring audio out using the headphone port, instead i found only pages of information about how you need a audio mixer device to do just that. being unable to backup my tapes in 2001, the time was up and right before we moved to a new home, my parents threw all 80+ of my tapes away, much to my dismay.

by 2006 the MP3 player rage was still ongoing and me and my buddies were hanging out at school and i thought about hooking our mp3 players to the auditorium's loud speakers, which had an audio controller that was usually hooked to the school's PC rear speaker port, when i checked out the cable i saw that it was infact the same sized port as the headphone port of our mp3 players so i immediately had the idea that i could maybe plug the audio cable from the loud speaker into our mp3 players, so that everyone will have something cool to listen to at lunch time, like we can all be DJs and it wouldn't matter even if we got in trouble since we were graduating anyways, if you know what i mean.

however none of my friends wanted to try that, thinking that the loud speaker's audio cable would not fit into the headphone port of their precious mp3 player and thus might break it. since i only had a sony walkphone phone which uses a proprietary port for its headphones i couldn't try it either. once again i went to a an internet forum and asked if it was possible to plug he audio cable from speakers to the headphone port of mpp3 player, but someone replied and told me not to do it because i'd ruin the headphone port"

some years after high school graduation, in 2008 one of my aforementioned classmate friend with the mp3 player were hanging and he casually told me that there's some problem with his eardrums now and that he couldn't hear as well as he used to, because of all the loud music he listened to all the time on his mp3 player. he asked if i remembered the time when i suggested that we tried hooking some speakers to the mp3 player, and he lamented that if he knew it was possible, he would've hooked the mp3 player to speakers at home, and this wouldn't have happen. i didn't say anything because he made me feel guilty and i blamed myself a little for what happened too. 

in 2013, i asked online again to see if there was then a simpler way to transfer the audio through audio-out and headphone port, however at the time someone told me that i could buy one of those new archival purpose cassette player which actually has a SD card slot that will atomically transfer the tapes to mp3 with the push of a button, however those things were not sold here unfortunately. while i searched on the internet at the time, again, still no information about whether audio-out transfer from headphone port could be done or not

in 2016 i discovered this guide, which i have listed below, written by a professional audiophile, however his guide was no different then what i heard over the decade about needing special hardware, cables and cassette player with audio-out ports.

https://www.online-tech-tips.com/computer-tips/transfer-audio-cassette-to-computer/

since that was no different than everything i read over the years, with the tapes being long gone anyways, i simply stopped looking into this matter from then on.

however the years go by, and in 2022 i accidentally discovered 6 leftover cassette tape that i recorded from the late 1990s, apparently i was going to discard them back then, due to the audio quality of the tapes being poor, as reflected in the recordings, thus i was going to throw those lot away but instead it was stashed away with my other stuff, thus these "rejects" survived.

after that, i started thinking about what so many people have told me about audio-out not being possible via the headphone port on the cassette player. it finally dawned on me that it might all be COMPLETE BULL-SHAT, so i decided to tried proving all those people wrong for myself, as detailed below.

- first i bought an Audio-out cable and first hooked it to the headphone port of a new cassette player, which plugged in just fine without causing damage at all.

- next i plug the audio-out cable directly into one of the audio ports with the karaoke icon located in the rear of my PC.

- then i opened VLC player on my pc, and after some tuning, i enabled Audio IN/OUT and when i started the cassette playback, and i could hear my recordings being audible on my pc's speakers.

- after that i discovered an audio capture option in VLC, abeit really crumble-some to use, as i finally made the transfer from cassette to digital mp3 perfectly.

at that point i was pretty mad, i've been misled and lied to since 2001 by the so called professional audiophiles, who says you cant do cassette to digital transfer using only the headphone port unless you have a mixer device, thus my entire collection of precious recording of 80 tapes was destroyed by my parents back in 2001 before i could backed them up, the voice of people from years bygone, some of whom i never saw again after i moved away.....all disappear into nothing because of misinformation. along with leaving me with a bad memory of stupid internet kids verbally attacking me for something they were ignorant with.


anyways if you look at some recent articles about converting cassette to digital mp3 on pc, you'll find that the articles still point towards need special hardware.

Everything You Need to Convert Your Cassette Tapes to Digital
www.reviewgeek.com › how-to-digitize-your-cassette-tapes
2022· USB cassette converter: The cheapest, easiest way to convert tapes to digital files. You just plug the converter into your computer, ...
How To Convert Cassettes To Digital Files | Organizing Photos
www.organizingphotos.net › convert-cassettes-to-digital
2022· Method 1: Using A Cassette To Digital Converter · Connect your cassette tape converter to your desktop or laptop with the cord. · Install the ...
Ways To Convert Your Old Cassette Tapes to Digital - DiJiFi
www.dijifi.com › blog › ways-to-convert-your-old-cassette...
2022· If you're going to convert your tapes to digital files, the best way is usually with a USB cassette converter. You'll put your tapes into a ...
Transfer Cassette Tapes to a Computer (Cheapest to Expensive)
legacybox.com › blogs › analog › how-can-i-transfer-cass...
The AGPtek Tape to PC Super USB converter (and other similar cassette tape converter products) look like an old Walkman, but records directly to your computer ...

i mean......WTF? it was the year 2022 and these audiophiles are still saying stuff like that? i'm not an audiophile but even someone like me could figure out myself by just plugging the damn audio cable into the headphone port and then plugging into the speaker port on my pc, why can't these professionals teach us to do the same all those years ago? or did they seriously not know?

i mean all 80 of my cassette tapes got destroyed before i could back it up because these audiophiles want us to buy thousand dollar equipment to do it like a pro.....WTF? why not teach us regular normal people a much cheaper and much easier way to backup our tapes? i mean can you imagine how many people around the world found their old stash of mixed tapes or radio recordings on cassette tapes, but would have no affordable nor easy way nor the motivation of backing them all up, when they see the audiophile's tutorial of presenting overly complicated and expensive way of backing up tapes with thousand dollar equipment and software?

i'm sure plenty of radio recordings on tapes have been lost to time and made unable to be archived because of this. i for one am one of those people who's a victim to misinformation so i firmly believe this, i mean, having something is better than NOTHING. even if this method of backup is not optimal in audiophile's eyes, again, its better than NOTHING. i mean does anyone know why the audiophiles have to use that other dastardly complicated and expensive hifi/mixer/soundblaster method to convert cassette tapes to digital? and why won't they recommend the easy method with just a cheap cable? its not possible they are unaware of this are they? i must be missing something here.

[mariush]

Sorry but it's your fault for not researching well enough
I mean... what did you think LINE IN meant on sound cards? Did you never bother to ask what's the difference between MIC and LINE IN, they're both inputs after all?  A quick look in a manual would have told you LINE IN accepts pre-amplified signals.

Not sure they existed in 2000 but if not, a bit later we also had sound cards with optical / coax digital INPUT, so you could get a cassette deck with optical/digital out and use a SPDIF / coaxial cable to transfer the sound digitally to the sound card and record it with lower noise and one less digital to analogue conversion.

[Kim Christensen]

Saving your personal recordings of you and your friends would have been worth it.
Saving old music you recorded off the radio... Not so much. I'd just download the digital version which is going to be so much better. There's the poor mans version of that too. 

Probably the audiofools were so wrapped up in perfection, that they couldn't even imagine trying to copy a tape with an old soundblaster card. I mean, those tapes probably had pretty horrible audio fidelity already, so I doubt even an amateur attempt at digitizing them with the crappiest soundcard would have make them sound much worse. Sorry for your loss.

[blueagent004]

Sorry but it's your fault for not researching well enough
I mean... what did you think LINE IN meant on sound cards? Did you never bother to ask what's the difference between MIC and LINE IN, they're both inputs after all?  A quick look in a manual would have told you LINE IN accepts pre-amplified signals.

Not sure they existed in 2000 but if not, a bit later we also had sound cards with optical / coax digital INPUT, so you could get a cassette deck with optical/digital out and use a SPDIF / coaxial cable to transfer the sound digitally to the sound card and record it with lower noise and one less digital to analogue conversion.

there's a circumstantial element.

i honestly have always thought that "LINE IN" was for karaoke, but even if i knew what "Line-In" was, in 2001 my teenage self wouldn't be able to know what to do with it, because all the audiophiles never recommended me that method.

they literally told me that i need to spent thousands of dollars on a hifi system with audio out ports, with a expensive audio mixer and soundblaster card and software, with names of cables i've never even heard of before......and i can't afford them, because my teen self had no allowance back then.

if it was just a cheap audio cable for connecting to the headphone port of the tape player to the pc line-in port, then my parents would understand.....and they would buy me that cable because they know i need to backup the tapes that they want to throw away.

but i can't ask my parents to spent thousands of dollars on a hifi system with audio out ports, with a expensive audio mixer and soundblaster card and software, just to allow me to backup my awesome tapes, which they said were worthless to them lol.


i did searched thoroughly, right up to the end, i did not want to see my parents discard my tapes, so i hung on to the end........i searched with the aforementioned search engines such Altavista, back then no one even used google back in spring of 2001. and search engines were not as accurate as they are now, i've gone through hundreds of pages of spam, viruses, viagra and porn link redirectors and found nothing about about being able to use the line-in port with a audio cable plugged to the headphone port of your cassette player. even now in 2023 all the tutorials still haven't mentioned the method i used, let alone back in 2001.

my parents were hell bent on throwing the tapes away in 2001, time was not on my side, and a teenager didn't have thousands of dollars for hifi, mixer and soundblaster. that was the unfortunate circumstances at the time.

Probably the audiofools were so wrapped up in perfection, that they couldn't even imagine trying to copy a tape with an old soundblaster card. I mean, those tapes probably had pretty horrible audio fidelity already, so I doubt even an amateur attempt at digitizing them with the crappiest soundcard would have make them sound much worse. Sorry for your loss.

OH! so they actually wanted to help me all along! they wanted me to have the best Dolby audio experience with maximum audio quality at 5000khrtz (to the extreme!!!!) after i backup everything to my pc, then played it back on the thousand dollar hifi and hear the pure and true sound quality of my friends and i screaming at each other and laughing at shats and giggles that'll shatter my eardrums, and push my sofa back with its awesome soundwaves while i put on sunglasses and hold a glass of wine like that guy in the maxell commericals.

how could i have misunderstood their purest intentions and pursuit for the ultimate sound quality for all these years! now i feel silly!


lol i miss my childhood school buddies and i wish i had backed up the tapes with them lol.

[807]

I was doing just that in the mid to late 1990's. Transferring cassette tapes to CD's via my pc. I think the software was provided free with the CD reader/writer. It might have been a version of Nero.

I was using an Akai tape deck with line out though. Although I did once try a portable cassette player using the headphone output. I'm going back a few decades now, but I vaguely remember making an attenuator out of a few resistors to bring the level down to line levels when the volume setting was around half way.

I didn't have internet access in those days, so just did it. I'm surprised no one on the forums you visited mentioned you could do this, or enlightened you about the line-in not being just for karaoke (I don't understand what that means anyway?).

Those current links you referred to about transferring to pc show you the easiest way to do it, not the only way.

[quadtech]

This one works - you can search for cassette usb mp3 converter and you will find many such and they are cheap and easy to use.
The conversion quality was perfectly good for old family recordings - didn't need to convert any hifi/music.

https://spinditty.com/instruments-gear/review-cassette-to-mp3-converter

[Haenk]

Consider the "WAF".
I bought such a standalone USB player for my wife, because she has 2 left hands when it comes to technical stuff. Pressing one button is an easy enough method to not bother me each and every time she wants to transfer a tape. Honestly, it sounded like ####; unfortunately, her laptop has #### line in as well, so that's not an option, either.
Eventually I got her an OK-ish USB-ADC and we wired up her tape deck, and got that running. Still requires a lot of support, but the sound is *way* better.
(Adjusting the head of that USB player turned out to be pointless, as the mechanism, the head and the ADC were exceptionally bad, all at once.)
Maybe (probably) we are somewhat audio-critical and for some other people, this might even be "good enough", obviously there is a market for these things.

[themadhippy]

but even someone like me could figure out myself by just plugging the damn audio cable into the headphone port and then plugging into the speaker port on my pc, why can't these professionals teach us to do the same all those years ago?

If you described it like this then no wonder they said it couldn't be done,"speaker port on pc" to me means a speaker output,somewhere to connect external speakers,its not an input.

[Siwastaja]

Very interesting story, but it's more about the lesson in life of trying things out instead of fearing about possible consequences of every little action. That's why we have all those nice things like airplanes. Would have never happened if somebody did not risk their lives at some point (of course taking the low hanging fruit precautions).

If you are overly careful and ask overly careful questions, you will also encounter extremely stupid people, if not outright trolls, who are not worth of your time. On the other hand, if you do your own research ("I tried plugging it in and X happened, why?") you will also see much better replies. Works on this forum, by the way, too.

During the time you posted about it on the interwebz, I was digitizing my C cassette tapes by plugging a cable from headphone output to the LINE IN of my Soundblaster 16 and clicking RECORD on Windows 3.1 Sound Recorder software. It never crossed my mind to ask about this online (online being a dial-up BBS, where I did ask shitloads of extremely stupid questions). I assumed there must be reason why such male-to-male 3.5mm cables are sold at every market and plugging a usual consumer product into another consumer product would be unlikely to damage anything.

Also, an old saying: it's easier to ask for forgiveness than get a permission.

[blueagent004]

I was doing just that in the mid to late 1990's. Transferring cassette tapes to CD's via my pc. I think the software was provided free with the CD reader/writer. It might have been a version of Nero.

I was using an Akai tape deck with line out though. Although I did once try a portable cassette player using the headphone output. I'm going back a few decades now, but I vaguely remember making an attenuator out of a few resistors to bring the level down to line levels when the volume setting was around half way.

i think someone said the port was for when you plugged a mic in, and i assume he meant karaoke because back in 2001 my head was full of karaoke from all the time i spent in the karaoke club with my classmates afterschool and eating drinking and singing karaoke so all i thought of was karaoke. i didn't found out until 2005 when i got a new gaming pc with geforce 6, and i was web-caming on MSN and i found out that the port was where i need to plug my new microphone in so my classmates can hear me.

i remember akai, in the early 1990s some of my classmates had akai walkmans because its was cheaper than sony or toshiba ones, but they were usually missing the radio tuner so you can't record stuff on the radio with your tapes on the go. i know another kid with an expensive walkman that can do that because he showed it off to us way back when lol.

During the time you posted about it on the interwebz, I was digitizing my C cassette tapes by plugging a cable from headphone output to the LINE IN of my Soundblaster 16 and clicking RECORD on Windows 3.1 Sound Recorder software. It never crossed my mind to ask about this online (online being a dial-up BBS, where I did ask shitloads of extremely stupid questions). I assumed there must be reason why such male-to-male 3.5mm cables are sold at every market and plugging a usual consumer product into another consumer product would be unlikely to damage anything.

Also, an old saying: it's easier to ask for forgiveness than get a permission.

i remember Sound Recorder software, it was there in windows 95 too, so you can actually use it like that....... i've never heard of being able to backup the audio in like that, so i think i'm definitely  sure that there wasn't a simple "male-to-male 3.5mm" tutuorial like the one above back in 2001.

i remember first seeing the male-to-male 3.5mm cables from one of the places where i frequently buy different brands of blank cassette tapes from in around the late 1990s, but i remember amusingly thinking that "wow how are people supposed to listen to music if both ends plug into the two walkmans? man the people who made these cables must be soooooo stooopid!!!" LOL

after i discovered my surviving batch of 6 cassette tapes recently, i started thinking about that headphone cable with the two 3.mm heads, since my local PC hardware shop has it so i gave it a try, i'm glad i did.

but you're right, its important to ask the right people, i should've just gone to that old HI-FI shop that was in my old apartment's mall and asked them for help instead of going to the forums in 2001. but i was scared because i was a teenager and i was afraid that the old shopkeeper there wont take me seriously, maybe he'd laugh at me and say stuff like "what do you mean expensive? you stupid kids don't know if you want something done you need to pay! hifi is supposed to be expensive, this hobby is not for you sonny!"

so yeah being too cautious can be detrimental, i agree with you 100%. 

If you described it like this then no wonder they said it couldn't be done,"speaker port on pc" to me means a speaker output,somewhere to connect external speakers,its not an input.

now that i think about it, if i had kept on asking about pluggin it in the speaker port, some of them might have misunderstood that my pc only had a speaker port, and not have a line-in port, since i didn't mention it. maybe that was why they said i need to buy the hifi/mixer/soundblaster pro combo?


i had an old HP Pavilion 7950 computer that my parents originally bought me in 2000, from looking at the specs it didn't seem to have a sound card, i can't remember because i never bother checking, obviously there was audio-out for the harmon kardon speakers it came with, but maybe the pc only had audio-out, and not audio-in, because the sound card was built into the motherboard? so that must be why they told me i needed a seperate sound blaster card because they figured i didn't have audio in port on my pc.

[tooki]

… so you could get a cassette deck with optical/digital out and use a SPDIF / coaxial cable to transfer the sound digitally to the sound card and record it with lower noise and one less digital to analogue conversion.

What are you talking about? The only cassette decks with digital outputs were the short-lived DCC decks.

[AndyBeez]

Sad story and a tragic loss to both yourself and your friends.

We have some very old recordings from the 70's of long departed family members which, we digitised during a Covid lock down as something constructive to do. We used a Kenwood tape deck playing line audio into a 'Dazzle' branded video converter which outputs audio as a USB stream. Then recorded to MP3 using the Audacity program. Audacity is clever as you can use it to filter a degree of tape noise, apply an amplitude compressor plus, save disk by dropping the dead spots. The resulting digital audio is a match to what was on those old tapes.

@Blueagent004 : I just hope your parents have been most happy for the last 22 years, having 80 tapes worth of an extra 468 cubic inches of space in their apartment? Which is roughly 2 US Gallons / 7.7 Litres in volume. 

[CatalinaWOW]

As I remember it was a bit hard to do tape transfer in 1989.  Simply because the software was a bit hard to find and definitely hard to use.  The stuff I used in the 1990s had terrible interfaces and was tied to specific hardware.  But since Audacity was released around 2000 it has been easy.  It is too bad that none of your efforts led you in that direction.

[boB]

I transferred our old family tapes from the 1950s to digital in the 1990s.  Then later could reduce the noise if I wanted to.

Transferred my 8 track reel2reel tapes and some cassettes and old 1970s reel2reel to digital as well.

Nice thing about digitizing old magnetic tape to digital is that almost any of the A/D converters to PC interfaces are wider dynamic range than the tapes so you don't really have to do anything special to make sure the transfer goes well.  That is, as long as you configure the gains and levels such that you can use most of that dynamic range affectively. Record at higher levels but make sure it doesn't clip.

Old and noisy tape transfers to digital might actually work ok too in to a MIC input as long as an attenuator is used with low output impedance from the cassette player into the MIC input stage and the MIC preamp gain is turned down so the gain structure is such that you get the best dynamic range and lowest noise level out of the conversion.   That way the conversion even with a MIC stage should contribute low enough noise to successfully transfer the old tapes 'good enough'

boB

[DimitriP]

When you have a "thing" with five knobs two buttons and three connectors,
You gotta find out what the knobs do , what the buttons do and what the connectors do.
Then "you" know.

The more you deviate from this, the more trouble you can run into.
Now, on to more pressing subjects, who should I vote for in the next election ? Can someone help me?  Just kidding.

[themadhippy]

We used a Kenwood tape deck playing line audio into a 'Dazzle' branded video converter which outputs audio as a USB stream. Then recorded to MP3 using the Audacity program

why not record direct into audacity from the tape deck?

The stuff I used in the 1990s had terrible interfaces and was tied to specific hardware

Was using cool edit around that time ,along with a minidisc machine producing sound effects became so much easier.

[S57UUU]

I think this is an interesting story, but also quite a sad one. It tells something about the crowdedness of life in places like Hongkong or Singapore, but also about being caught in a social bubble (gaming/karaoke in this case), even before facebook et al existed.
Of course, one must take into consideration the age of the OP,  as he says it all started in kindergarten! For a kid, other kids a few years older (at a gaming forum) are like omniscient beings, so he doesn't doubt their wisdom.
His dad wanted him to learn electronics, so maybe if asked, he could have helped him? Or somebody technical in his family (who owned a soldering iron :-)?
If you want an answer to a technical question, you don't ask a religious sect (like the audiophilians), but maybe, being in the bubble, the boy did not even realize, that this was a technical question, not a "musical" one?

[AndyBeez]

why not record direct into audacity from the tape deck?

Laptop did not a have a suitable line-In. Only microphone

On a side issue, just how long can you keep audio on compact cassette for? Which type of tape, Ferric, Chrome, Metal, is the most permanent?

[madires]

My setup: old high quality tapedeck, line-out into line-in of PC's built-in audio card, and audacity for recording
Hints:
- Adjust the recording level to get the maximum dynamic range while preventing clipping (ideally for each song separately, or loudest song on tape for the lazy).
- Don't use modern tape players! They are junk (terrible wow and flutter, poor frequency range).
- Pay attention to noise reduction (Dolby what-ever)! If tape is recoreded with X play it back with X! If nothing is noted on the tape cover use your ears to figure out the mode used.
- Same for the tape type.
 

[tooki]

On a side issue, just how long can you keep audio on compact cassette for? Which type of tape, Ferric, Chrome, Metal, is the most permanent?

I don’t think we really know yet: cassettes that are stored properly (low humidity, cool but not cold temperature, and without large fluctuations in either) are generally still in excellent condition. All of my cassettes from the 80s and 90s are in perfect shape. The players are the bigger problem!!

[wasedadoc]

On a side issue, just how long can you keep audio on compact cassette for? Which type of tape, Ferric, Chrome, Metal, is the most permanent?

I don’t think we really know yet: cassettes that are stored properly (low humidity, cool but not cold temperature, and without large fluctuations in either) are generally still in excellent condition. All of my cassettes from the 80s and 90s are in perfect shape. The players are the bigger problem!!

I recently replaced the two belts in a high end Sony deck. Off-tape monitoring, Dolby B, C and S. Belts had turned into a sticky mess.  Other than that it was in excellent condition and I was sad to have to return it to its owner.

[Kim Christensen]

On a side issue, just how long can you keep audio on compact cassette for? Which type of tape, Ferric, Chrome, Metal, is the most permanent?

I don’t think we really know yet: cassettes that are stored properly (low humidity, cool but not cold temperature, and without large fluctuations in either) are generally still in excellent condition. All of my cassettes from the 80s and 90s are in perfect shape. The players are the bigger problem!!

Don't they slowly demagnetize? I remember playing back some really old tapes and the high frequencies seemed to be really attenuated. Or maybe it's just my nostalgic memory thinking it sounded better in the past.

[wasedadoc]

Print-through can be an issue.  I have BASF cassettes recorded around 1970 that suffer from it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Print-through

[blueagent004]

Sad story and a tragic loss to both yourself and your friends.

We have some very old recordings from the 70's of long departed family members which, we digitised during a Covid lock down as something constructive to do. We used a Kenwood tape deck playing line audio into a 'Dazzle' branded video converter which outputs audio as a USB stream. Then recorded to MP3 using the Audacity program. Audacity is clever as you can use it to filter a degree of tape noise, apply an amplitude compressor plus, save disk by dropping the dead spots. The resulting digital audio is a match to what was on those old tapes.

@Blueagent004 : I just hope your parents have been most happy for the last 22 years, having 80 tapes worth of an extra 468 cubic inches of space in their apartment? Which is roughly 2 US Gallons / 7.7 Litres in volume.

so sorry for your loss, and thanks for recommending Audacity, i'm using it to re-digitize all my tapes as VLC's capture audio has resulted in the background static noise being louder than the recordings themselves, but everyone else has posted alot of info here on reducing noise so i'm still learning and reading about that.

the audio quality on my surviving tapes however seem to be degrading fast, with each passthrough the sound quality just keeps getting worse and worse. in the 1990s i remember the old saying that if you listen to the tapes too much you'd ruin it, because the magnetics on the tapes will dissipate or something. right now its only been 2 more pass-throughs to re-digitize them with better quality, but the tapes just sounded worse and worse....


as for my parents, they also threw away all my old school photos and my photo sticker collection from the photo sticker machines that my friends and classmates were dragging me around to take photos in, together in various arcade places back in the mid 2000s, with only a small batch of photo stickers that survived in my old homework binder, because i forgot to take them out. so destroying this precious memory of mine too also saved them something like (20x) 0.11 ounces of precious, precious space. i'm glad i was a good and honorable son.

His dad wanted him to learn electronics, so maybe if asked, he could have helped him? Or somebody technical in his family (who owned a soldering iron :-)?
If you want an answer to a technical question, you don't ask a religious sect (like the audiophilians), but maybe, being in the bubble, the boy did not even realize, that this was a technical question, not a "musical" one?

my dad threw away the player too because it didn't fit in our cardboard boxes because its awesome double decker body was too "wide" so that'd waste precious space too. i did asked him back in 2001 to help me, but he haven't a clue. still after we settled in new home, he got me another new combo player with both CD and cassette record, but i never bothered with it anymore.

i actually smiled at the church of audiophilians part, lol thanks for brightening my day. still i guess i was to blame because i told them i had alot of radio recorded songs on the tapes as well, so they must have wanted me to have the best audio quality possible.

the thing with recording songs on radios, is that often its played at a random hour so you recorded the songs with no DJ announcing the names of the song/artist, and over the years one would forget what they were called. but so long as you still have the tapes you can digitize them and post online and ask people what the names of all the kickass songs you were into back then. obviously if the tapes are gone, one can never re-find all the songs except to hum the few tunes that could still be occasionally remembered.

but i'm grateful he got me the cassette player, i think kids should learnt how to record stuff because in the late 2000s when i was college, i instinctively used my cellphone to record all my lectures aside from jogging notes, which alot of my college friends thought was weird, but at home i'd listen to the lectures over and over and drill everything to my head, which helped me pass my exams.

recently in 2022 one of the surviving batch of tapes i found, which i messed around with in the 1990s, actually had my uncle's name written on it, containing a recording of his IT lecture at his university in his younger days, where the professor was teaching him how to clear the memory cache from one cycle of the IBM CPU, and also something about switching the MASTER/SLAVE or something.

anyways if i can get Audacity to clear up the muffled background noices and increase the audio quality which are now degrading rapidly on the tapes, i might post some of the radio recordings that are in english just for laughs.

thanks everyone for listening to my story and for all the helpful technical advice! i much appreciate it! 

[bson]

My wife recently converted a large box of cassettes in the basement, that she recorded at various performances (mainly NY punk scene) in the early to mid 80s.  She hasn't had a cassette player in at least 20 years, maybe 30.  One of those cheapo USB things worked great, it's not like any of her tapes were hifi grade anyway.  I was surprised they still played and held up, pretty impressive.  I had sort of expected them to crumble into dust at the slightest provocation.