Analog media has become a thing of the past. Cassette players are slowly disappearing from the electronics sections of department stores. CD and MP3 players are in, cassette players are out. It's almost impossible to see real turntables being displayed other than in music or DJ equipment stores, and the good ones are not cheap. This significant and fast change in the way we store our media today creates for us a new challenge, the preservation and transfer of our old media content to new digital mediums. I say preservation because we don't want to lose it, and transfer because we still want to enjoy it. So how do we do it?
First, stay away from inexpensive equipment being sold at stores marketed as media conversion tools to transfer your cassette tapes or records to CDs. Generally, these products don't perform any editing or noise reduction to improve the sound of your media. They also are not high quality products as far as sound reproduction. If you have decided to transfer your old media you might as well do it right and be satisfied with the results since this is something you will most likely only do once.
The first step would be to have an excellent player to produce the best sound possible. You can find a studio quality cassette player for about 0.00 and a decent turntable for about 0.00. You will also need a USB audio interface like the American Audio Versaport unit Guitar Center carries for about 0.00. You will also need a good audio editing program so that you can capture the sound, perform any necessary editing and burn the results onto a CD. Audacity is a free one you can get from www.download.com.
This is pretty much all you need as far as equipment and software, but as you can see, it will cost you about 0.00. This does not include quality blank CDs (not all CDs are created equal) and all the time you will need to setup and learn how to use all of this on your own.
Your other alternative depending on how many records or cassettes you actually want to transfer is to utilize a professional service like www.mediacure.net to do this for you. Sure, you might save some money by doing it on your own assuming you have hundreds of tapes or records, but that does not take into account the learning curve or how time consuming this process can be. This service offers several packages and options including transferring all of your media to MP3 files if all you want to do is load it into your MP3 player or computer to then burn on your own. The choice is yours.
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