FWIW, when I did my cassette-ripping, I used the open source Audacity app for the transfer.
From within Audacity, you can select and label regions of a recording such that you can then perform a multi-export to save each region as a separate file, including per-file metadata in the ID3 tags.
My cassette-ripping procedure is:
Use a generic USB audio-input device. I use a Behringer UFO-202 which is a pretty inexpensive device that includes a phono pre-amp (for recording from vinyl). And no drivers are required - macOS sees it as a generic audio input device.
Record into Audacity. Let the entire tape/record side play.
Select and label regions for each track.
Post-process (if desired) the tracks. My usual steps are:
Change speed and pitch if the source was recorded at the wrong speed - some of my live recordings suffer from this, probably because the motor of the original recorder was at the wrong speed due to a low battery. It can also compensate if your turntable or cassette deck is playing at the wrong speed.
Various EQs or filters if necessary. Usually only necessary for recordings from bad sources like live concert recordings or recordings from radio broadcasts.
Normalization, to boost all levels to just below the clipping level. Note that I do not apply compression which would permit higher volume levels at the expense of reduced dynamic range.
Export all the labeled regions as separate tracks. I usually export to AIFF (for an uncompressed archival copy). But MP3 and AAC are also options.
After importing the AIFFs to Music, I use it to convert to AAC (128 Kbps, variable bit-rate) and delete the AIFFs.
Mr. Shamino, Shazam! That’s an amazing guide, thanks very much for splitting this off and posting it! I’m trying to recall what I used for the conversion, it was at least 8 years ago… hm…
I know I had trouble with the LPs as the speed of the turntable varied. I ordered and installed a new rubber drivebelt which helped a bit but there are variations. Ah well, I’m not a music purist and at the time I was moving and putting all CD/LP/DVD etc in storage, and gave my stereo gear to my nephew, who teaches music at a high school.
I was not sure how many years it would be til I saw my property again so I did a rush job of digitizing lots of stuff. Took high resolution digital photos of saved newspaper clippings from when i was a photographer, and dumped about 95% in the bin for example, and same with about a dozen photo albums from childhood onwards. Lived out of suitcases for a couple of years but eventually had the stuff delivered.
But I digress, thanks again for the info, I’ll refer to it if I ever re-do the digitization!
If your turntable or cassette deck is at the wrong speed, then you’re right to start by replacing the belts.
If that doesn’t help, the motor may be at the wrong speed. Good turntables have convenient speed adjustment knobs. Cheaper turntables and cassette decks usually have adjustment screws, but you may need to partially disassemble the unit to get access, but you shouldn’t touch them unless you have calibration equipment, because you can easily make things worse.
For a turntable, the easiest way is with a strobe disc. Place it on the turntable and shine an incandescent light (or something else that will suitably flicker at the frequency of your mains power) and adjust the speed until the correct ring of bars appear to be standing still. (There should be four rings - 33â…“ and 45 RPM at 50 and 60 Hz each. Some discs may also have rings for 16 and/or 78 RPM).
You can also buy kits that include a calibrated strobe light so you don’t have to have an AC-powered incandescent light on hand (e.g. Amazon link)
You can also get a test tone record. These have tracks with specifically calibrated frequencies (Tones at various frequencies, frequency sweeps, left-only and right-only versions and other patterns). The idea is that you would play this, sending the output to test equipment (or a software equivalent), and it will show you the audio frequency and how it varies (wow & flutter). You can then adjust the device while watching the meter so the frequency of the audio matches the frequency used by the test disc’s track.
Unfortunately, wow and flutter meters are not cheap, and software apps are generally sold to professionals, so they aren’t cheap either.
There are some free downloads, but they appear to be for Windows, not macOS.
For a cassette deck, the process is similar. You’d need a professionally recorded tape with a well-known fixed tone (typically 3 kHz) and play it into test equipment (same as you’d use for a turntable) to measure the speed, wow and flutter and then adjust the deck accordingly.
Unfortunately, calibration cassettes seem to be hard to come by these days, and those that sell them charge a lot.
The only other way I can think of for calibrating a tape deck’s speed would be to play a commercial recording of a well-known music album and compare it to playback of a CD or downloaded/streamed copy (which is presumed but not guaranteed to be correct). But that will require either a good ear or a lot of annoying playing around with Audacity (or something similar) to compare your deck’s output against the downloaded/ripped track.
Thanks for this thread. I used Audacity to rip many cassettes using a newly purchased tape deck (the old one died) with USB ports. The quality is at least as good as the deck it replaced. But I never got around to splitting the songs–until today. This post motivated me to get back to work.
This (TASCAM 202) is one of the few halfway decent models still manufactured.
It’s the professional version of the TEAC W-1200. Which sells for the same price but has a slightly different feature set.
But the differences appear to be mostly cosmetic. All I could determine from the product photos are:
The TASCAM has rack-mounting ears
The TASCAM has a “play mode” switch (not sure what that is)
The TEAC has a voltage selector switch
The displays are different colors
Unfortunately, no new tape deck has Dolby noise reduction anymore. Dolby no longer manufactures or licenses their noise reduction chips, so you can’t get a deck with it. And the no-name noise reduction that you may find usually can only decode Dolby-B correctly.
But I was able to find a software package that provides the feature, so you may be able to compensate. Especially if you’re trying to rip tapes that you recorded with Dolby-C (which sound terrible without a corresponding decoder).
There may be other software-based Dolby CODECs, but I haven’t looked that hard.
Mr. Shamino, thanks for the expansions on the topic! Amazing!
The turntable, and now you mention it, I recall the cassette deck too, were not necessarily wrong speed but changing speed as they play. Even to my untrained ears this was noticeable. They were decent quality products, possibly just suffering from infrequent use.
Speed variation is “wow and flutter”. Slow changes are “wow” while fast changes are “flutter”.
Small amounts are unavoidable, which is why spec sheets always document a maximum amount. But if there’s so much you notice it, then it’s usually due to a worn belt (possibly from sitting in one position for many years) or a warped record.
Great ideas you’ve given. One other thing to try is to use some tracks that one knows have the correct timing as from a CD and compare to the troublesome deck or turntable by switching back and forth from a preamp or receiver. It is usually obvious when the pitch is off due to speed errors. It was nice in the old days when decent cassette decks and reel to reel players had a pitch control to compensate for problem recordings. One nice thing about direct drive turntables is there usually is a speed control.
I would recommend to those of you just starting to rip CD’s etc. that you keep the AIFF files or similar since you might decide down the road that want to convert to another format such as Apple Lossless or FLAC and you don’t want to have to go through the ripping process again. If you have the original files, it’s easy to use XLD to batch convert files to any standard format. I would also use at least 256Kbps AAC or near that since 128Kbps AAC while decent is streaming quality and I always want the closest or equivalent to CD quality which is AIFF, Apple Lossless or FLAC.
I may not have been clear. I do keep them, but in an off-line archive. I delete them from the Music app, to avoid bloating the library and the content I sync to my devices.
For anyone starting to (or thinking of) ripping CDs, be aware that CDs and DVDs deteriorate over several years and could become unreadable after a decade or so. It is best to convert them to audio files as described above.
FWIIW I still have an analog to digital converter that input audio and video signals and output digital files via Firewire. If I wanted to use it again I would have to find a Mac that has Firewire ports!
I used to use Sound Studio for editing audio files.
I disagree. I have several hundred CDs, and only one or two have failed like this.
So-called Disc rot is real, but it only affects discs with manufacturing defects, not all discs.
But since you can’t know in advance whether any particular disc has such a defect (and major manufacturing houses have produced bad discs), Michael’s advice is still valid.
One kind of wow is “once around wow”, caused by having the record spindle hole being slightly off-center.
Nakamichi created a turntable – the TX-1000 – that corrects for this. It adjusts the platter so that the record is perfectly centered, even with an off-center hole.
And this isn’t the first time Nakamichi released overlay engineered products. One problem with auto-reversing tape decks is asimuth. To play a tape, the playback head is at a slight angle to the tape. The problem is that the perfect angle for playing a tape forwards is completely wrong when playing the other side in reverse.
So 99.9999% of auto-reversing tape decks just use a head with no azimuth. They’re wrong in both directions.
But not Nakamichi! The famous Nakamichi Dragon tape deck automatically detected the optimum azimuth for playback and rotated the head into exact alignment. When it reversed, it did it again, rotating to the opposite asimuth.
The downside was this mechanism made the Dragon expensive. So then they came up with another model, with a batshit crazy solution. The RX-5050 auto-reverses by physically flipping the tape!
(I was a proud owner of a Nakamichi 480. Technically I still own it, but a repair shop stole it from me, which is another story.)
I highly recommend VinylStudio for ripping vinyl, tapes, or whatever. It is specifically for that purpose. The developer is highly responsive in the forums dedicated to the project. I’ve been using it for years.
The generalization you’re making is not valid and way off the mark. There are certainly instances where you might find a disc or two that won’t play but I’ve only had it happen with one CD and two or three DVD’s. The DVD’s were made at one factory that had a bad press and after some time, it was determined that some of the discs that were made in that factory ended up being defective after some time:
My collection is somewhere over 2,500 CD’s and DVD’s which I play in rotation so while there are some that I might overlook, I’ve yet to find another CD (or DVD) that won’t play and my older car still has a CD player so enough of them get played there. Most of my discs are over 20 years old so by now by your logic, I would have all kinds of defects.
Since we’re discussing disc rot now, a good thing to know for Criterion fans is that Criterion will replace certain Blu-Ray discs, even a few that are out of print, that had manufacturing defects. So if you find a Criterion Blu-Ray in your collection has stopped playing properly, reach out to Criterion. When I did so on a single title, Criterion responded by sending me a list of discs that were eligible for replacement. That’s what I call great customer service.
In the thread I referenced earlier, Warner will do the same although some have stated they did not get replacements but others did. But one has to check the code on the disc as the problem ones that Warner made were specific to that Pennsylvania factory which is now closed.
I have a couple of thousand commercial CDs in my collection. As far as I know, I’ve only seen one suffer from Disc rot, and that actually happened within just a couple of years of purchase due to an obvious manufacturing defect. It actually had mold growing inside of it! Otherwise, my oldest CDs are forty years old (!!!), and they are fine.
On the other hand, Disc rot definitely can be a problem with older consumer-recordable CDs. If you have any critical data or audio on old CD-Rs, I recommend making a backup to other media sooner rather than later.
It’s been my experience that most publishers will replace defective media if you contact (possibly in writing) their customer service department. The 3-4 times I had a problem, the publishers were very helpful and (to my surprise) didn’t even want me to send back the old defective media.
When contacting them, I make sure to send all the details, including any serial numbers stamped on the media, along with photos of the discs showing the damage.
Of course, if the title is out of print, you may not be able to get a replacement, but that (fortunately) has not happened to me.
Definitely. Not necessarily “rot”, but recordable media usually has the recording surface attached to the upper (label) side of the media, with little, if any, protection. If you put a piece of duck tape on that side and peel it off, you will often peel away the dyed metal (and all of the data).
Printable media (the ones with a rough white surface that you can write on with ordinary pens/pencils) are a bit better, because there is a coating over the media. But yes, recordable media is, sadly, quite fragile.
