So all of your recorded mixes are on cassette? Still working on the old school format? Not recording directly into the computer? This tutorial will teach you how to convert your cassettes to either mp3 or wav format so that you can burn to CD or post your mixes on the web.

1. Connect your cassette tape player to the LINE-IN input plug on your sound card. If your sound card only has a mini 1/8th input and your cassette player has only RCA's, you should be able to purchase an adapter that has stereo female RCA connectors to a male stereo mini-plug (1/8th inch). You can also connect your cassette player to your home stereo system to provide better cable compatibility however if you do, TURN OFF YOUR EQ or SET THE EQ FLAT.
   
   
2. Make sure you have got the correct Line Source selected or armed for recording on your sound card. On my system that has a Sound Blaster Platinum Extigy, it is found by double clicking on the Creative icon with the speaker. Then chose the appropriate source using the dropdown. Otherwise, go to Control Panel->Sounds and Multimedia->Device Properties
   
   
3. Turn the volume completely off for your cassette player, hit play, then slowly turn up the player's volume until it reaches half-way or its too loud or distorted. If all works correctly, you should hear music playing out of your PC speakers.
   
   
4. If you have MusicMatch Jukebox, then you can simply use this app as an efficient means of recording from LINE-IN. Hit play on the cassette player and hit record in the jukebox application. You should end up with is a WAV file that is around 10 MB in size for every minute of recording.
   
   
5. If you're a little more advanced, you may want to substitute MusicMatch for an audio editor. I prefer Sonic Foundry's Sound Forge 5.0 since its the most powerful recording application available with plug-ins useful for filtering out noise or restoring audio quality due to inconsistencies. Start up the audio editor and make sure you have set your recording parameters to 44.1 khz, stereo and 16 bit. The resulting WAV file will be of 'CD quality'.
   
   
6. To convert the WAV to MP3, there are a lot of choices. If you're a beginner, you may want to download an all-in-one package that offers an MP3 encoder, decoder and player. See the MP3 section of this site. When you go to encode remember that the higher the bit-rate, the higher the audible quality of the music. An MP3 file in stereo at 128Kbps is the standard, but you can go much higher if you want. Sound Forge 5.0 has a built mp3 encoder/decoder.
   
   
   
   
   
   
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