Music CDs have been the standard for years, but there are still plenty of people with loads of old audiocassettes who want to transfer their tunes to disks using their computers.
It can be a simple setup, and making the change will save the taped music from fading away. Transferring tapes to CD through a computer also can enhance the listening experience, although those with finely tuned ears might find the end result lacking.
Still, converting old audio lets listeners reclaim their music, letting them play it in portable and in-vehicle CD players and saving it to a more sturdy medium.
There are many programs available for recording and refining music on a computer and then saving it to blank CDs, ranging from shareware software to powerful professional applications such as Sound Forge, which is made by Sonic Foundry in Madison, Wis.
Those looking to do a simple transfer should experiment with programs such as Pyro 2003 from Cakewalk, Cool Edit 2000 from Syntrillium Software or Sound Forge Studio 6, which is a slimmed-down version of the professional product.
All of these — and many others available on the Net — have demonstration versions that let people experiment before buying, but most software companies limit their programs' functionality to keep potential customers honest.
To capture the music from old tapes, users need to connect their audio source — whether it's a tape player, stereo system or something else — to their computer's sound card.
Most sound cards have at least three one-eighth-inch jacks, which are often referred to as miniplugs, and the music source needs to be plugged into the sound card's "line in" port.
Users will need an RCA-to-miniplug adapter in order to attach their stereos to their computers, along with the appropriate cables, all of which is available cheaply at most electronic stores.
Then it's a simple matter of playing the music from the source and using the software to save it to the computer's hard drive as a .wav file. The process takes only minutes to set up, but the digital recording occurs in real time, so users must wait for the music to play out.
After the tape is spent, the new digital music file can be edited into separate tracks, the background noise can be reduced, and effects can be added.
Many consumer audio editing programs also can silence the background hiss of tape recordings and filter out the grainy pops and cracks prevalent in LPs. And if you want to get fancy, you can use cross-fade and fade-out features to give the compilation a smoother groove before burning to blank CDs or compressing the music into MP3s.
"Generally, what people want to do is normalize their tracks by bringing the overall volume up and making it consistent," said Rick Hoefling, product marketing manager at Sonic Foundry. "It depends on how much you want to color or affect the files."
Hoefling said Sound Forge Studio uses much of the same technology in its professional-level Sound Forge but lacks many key features, including noise reduction components.
"You can still rip CDs, and you can burn them," Hoefling said of Sound Forge Studio, which costs $60. "You can do a fair amount using your editing tools."
Hoefling said that people working with digital audio need to have computers with large hard drives because sound files translate to about 10 megabytes for each minute of CD-quality sound.
"When you are editing audio, you are dealing with a lot of algorithms and code, so it's also processor-intensive," he said.
The professional Sound Forge package, which costs about $400, has a sea of features that will likely overwhelm novices and prove to be overkill for those simply converting old audio tapes and records.
For an audio editing program that is more in the middle ground, there is Cool Edit 2000, which comes with a built-in noise reduction feature and supports an additional "plug-in" program designed to clean up clicks, pops and crackles.
Dan Janal of Excelsior, Minn., who runs a business that produces telephone seminars for trainers and authors, has been using the software to clean up recordings of his "teleseminars" for the last few months.
"If you are from my generation where we recorded from LPs to cassettes, with all those clicks and pops, we tolerated them when we were teen-agers, but we don't have to tolerate them anymore," said the 47-year-old Janal. "I am recording with a cheap Radio Shack cassette player. With less than $125 or $150, you can be in business."
Janal warned that "if you have an older computer, you will grow a beard by the time it does all the computer processing" during the audio editing process.
David Torrey, who runs DRT Mastering in Peterborough, N.H., said home users should address the "greatest defect with the cassette" sound when editing their music. He cautioned against cutting too much noise from their music "because it starts to mess with the harmonics." Torrey's Web site, www.drtmastering.com, has information for music professionals and enthusiasts on analog and digital mastering, tips for making mixes and other topics.