Freedman Center/Converting Cassette Tapes

[edit] Capturing the Audio Cassette

  1. Ensure that the cassette to be converted is clean.
  2. Power on the cassette player.
  3. Place the cassette into the cassette player.
  4. Select the tape audio source on the black Sima selector box. The video source box should be powered off.
  5. Find the position on the tape where the audio to be recorded is located.
  6. Open the Sound Forge Audio Studio, located in the Audio Editors Folder on the desktop.
  7. To test the audio quality, press the play button on the cassette player.
  8. Once satisfied with the quality of the audio, stop the cassette and rewind to the starting point.
  9. Now we're ready to start the recording process:
    • a. Click the record button in Sound Forge. This will pop up another window.
    • b. Press the record button in this window to begin recording the file onto the computer.
  10. Press the Play button on the cassette player.
  11. Once the tape is finished recording, press the stop button and close the pop up window.
  12. Save the file in your CaseID folder in My Documents

[edit] Creating Audio Tracks

If you'd like to separate the audio into tracks:

  1. Zoom in on the audio file to easily see the beginning and end of each segment.
  2. Click near the beginning of the clip and press M to create a marker
    • This marker can then be dragged as close to the clip as possible.
  3. Make a marker at the beginning and the end of each clip.
  4. Zoom back out to see all the markers/clips together.
  5. Double click on a clip. (This will automatically highlight from one marker to the next)
  6. Press Ctrl + C to copy, then Ctrl + E to move a copy to a new file.
  7. In this new file, go to Process and select Normalize. (This will make sure your clip is neither too loud nor too soft.)
    • Press OK on the normalize dialog box.
  8. Save the new file in your folder.


Freedman Center Howto Guides
Category Guides
Audio Converting Records | Converting Cassette Tapes
Recording Voice | Podcasting
Video Capturing Video | Transcoding Video | DVD Authoring | DVD Photo Slideshow
Scanning Basic Flatbed | Large Flatbed | Transparent Media | Slides
Negative Film | Sidekick Scanning | TextBridge OCR
Microfiche | Microfilm
Video Conferencing MSN Messenger 7.0
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This page was last modified 18:03, June 29, 2009 by Michael Crawford.
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