Monday, July 26, 2010

Cheapest Way to Rip from Cassette Tape to MP3

Do you just found some old cassette tapes when tidying up for christmas? Do you want to copy it to your PC and burn it into CD or DVD? You could rip your cassette tape to MP3 for the cost of a cable. The first thing you need is to connect your cassette player to your PC soundcard, then play the cassette whilst recording on your PC. There are several recording software which will help you do the recording, some of them are free to download such as Audacity and Magix Audio Cleaning Lab. If you record your cassette tape to MP3 format (at 128 kbps) the file size will be around 1MB per minute, or if you are using WAV format it will be around 10MB per minute.
The last thing you need to do is to burn the audio files to the CD or DVD. You could use free software such as CDBurnerXP and ImgBurn or for more professional output you could buy any commercial software to burn into CD and DVD such as Nero Burning Software.
Friday, July 23, 2010

History of the Cassette Tape Recorder

In today's digital world, it's pretty easy to forget that cassete tapes were the most popular media for listening music back in the 1950s to the 1980s whereas in the late 1980s the explosion of digital audio formats started the end for cassete tapes.

Introduction

Portable recording machines have existed since the 1930s but did not become more popular until the post-World War II era, when prosperity began to arise and create a booming of new consumer-goods product equipped with latest technology. In 1962, Philips Company of the Netherlands invented and released the first compact audio-cassette. They used high-quality polyester 1/8-inch tape produced by BASF. Recording and playback was at a speed of 1.7/8 inches per second. The next year in the U.S. sales began of the Norelco Carry-Corder dictation machine that used the new cassette tape. The consumer's demand for blank tape used for personal music-recording was unanticipated by Philips.

Peak of Popularity
During the 1970s and 1980s cassette tape recorders reached their peak of popularity as electronics giants such as Toshiba, Sony, RCA, and SANYO competed to win the battle of cassette tape recorders using various refinements, such as compact quadraphonic tape recorders. The last boom of the cassete tape recorders occurred in 1979, with the introduction of the very popular Tascam Portastudio. Empowered with the four and eight-track machines made by Tascam and its main competitor, Fostex, any musicians could make high quality recordings without using such an expensive studio.

Decline
1987 is the declining point of the cassette tape recorders, as the introduction of digital audio tape. in 1990s, home computers with hard drives (as well as floppy discs and CD-ROM drive) made the cassete tape recorders obsolete. The Compact Disc, which had been introduced in 1982, finally became inexpensive enough to compete with cassette tape, thus ending the glory of cassette tape recorders.