Transfer from LP or Cassette to CD

What do you do with all the old LP's and cassette tapes which have built up over the decades? There are several ways to get them onto CD discs:

  1. To use a specialist service, which can be expensive.
  2. To buy one of the several turntables now available (Ion, Hammacher Schlemmer and variations, some of which allow a cassette player to be plugged in). Then use the supplied software to create the CD. Still somewhat expensive.
  3. To find free software, buy a Y phone to 3.5mm jack plug cable, make the connections and use the software to create the CD.

Since options 1 and 2 only require a purchase and then following whatever instructions are included, AllIncontext decided to look into option 3. This does assume that you have a PC available which allows a Line In connection for the Y cable and for CD's to be burned. If the answers to the latter are yes, then the main questions which arise are:

  a. What free software is available.
  b. Where can you get a Y cable.
  c. How to connect everything up.
  d. Make a recording.
  e; What CD types are suitable for both burning and playing.

Free software: A web search revealed that two likely candidates are Audacity and Audiograbber (although there are others depending on what forms of output file are commonly generated, for example MP3 rather than WAV). Audacity was selected for no other reason than it comes alphabetically before Audiograbber. However, the steps required to go from LP (or cassette) to CD will be similar for both.

Y cable: These can be obtained on the web. However, we went to to look for one in the major chains (Comet, Currys and PC World) without any luck. We did obtain one in a local electrical and HiFi shop. The Y cable has one red and one white (or black) RCA phone cable at one end and a 3.5 mm jack plug at the other. This plug needs to have two black rings on it which denotes that it is a stereo plug. If it only has one, then it is only capable of making a mono recording.

Connecting things up: For an LP, if the record deck is connected to a phono pre-amp, the phono plugs of the Y cable can be connected to the pre-amp. If the deck is connected to a HiFi amplifier/receiver, the Y cable needs to be connected to the Line Out sockets. The Y cable jack plug is connected to the Line In on the PC sound card or the equivalent socket on a notebook. For a cassete, the Y cable phono plugs need to be connected to the Line out sockets of the casette recorder or player.

Make a recording: Install Audacity. Open it up, which gives you a window with the usual sort of CD player buttons (pause, record, stop). To get the audio signal from the Y cable into Audacity, the source needs to be selected (see this FAQ, and a useful link which addresses Audiograbber and configuring the Sound Card is here).

Now, play the CD (or the cassette) and click on the Audacity record button. If all is well, the record levels (in red) at the top right of the window will start to change. The output levels (to the left of the record levels and in green) might not be visible. The output can be checked by right clicking on the loudspeaker in the PC task tray and selecting the Open Volume Control to ensure that the Master Volume Mute is unchecked. If there are no red record levels in Audacity, check that the Line Volume Mute is unchecked on the Master Volume window.

When the LP or cassette has stopped, click on the Audacity stop button. Then select the Edit menu, and the Select... sub menu, and then click on All (or use Ctrl+A). This will select all the audio. To split the whole recording into tracks, select the Analyze menu and click on the Silence Finder... item. This displays a window where the parameters of defining what a silence is can be changed. Just click the OK button to select the defaults. When this process is complete, a number of labels denoted by a red flag with an S will be displayed. Use the mouse and the scrollbar at the bottom of the window to move from the end of the recording to the beginning. You can stop at any label, click in the waveform area and a black vertical line will be shown where the S label is located. The silence can be removed by pressing the backspace key and then pressing the enter key. If the label cannot be edited in this way, the most likely cause is that the silence finder left a label in the edit state. Just move the scrollbar to find it and either delete it or press the escape key to leave it in place. Make sure that an S label exists at the start and end of the recording. These can be inserted by clicking on the waveform to get the vertical black bar, then select the Project menu and the Add label at Selection item. This gives a small red edit box. Type in a capital S and press the enter key.

For LP's, the silence finder does a reasonable job when the LP has a good dynamic range. If you want to do the job manually, put a label at the start, whizz along the waveform, and where it looks like silence, put in another label. This method probably works better with cassettes and for live recordings, where audience noise can result in dozen's of silences between music.

To output the music, click on the File menu and select the Export Multiple item. This displays a window. Top left is a drop down box. Select the output type (e.g. WAV). Then select the Export location:, and then click on the Numbering consecutively radio button on the right in the Name files: area. A File name prefix: can be entered. If this is kept to about 50 characters, the track names will not have to be edited down when the tracks are copied to the CD burning area.

To burn the tracks to CD, the easiest way is to put a blank disk in the CD drive, then select the CD drive from Windows Explorer. Open the Export Location window and drag and drop tracks one at a time to the CD drive right hand pane. The reason for doing it one at a time is to ensure that the tracks are listed (and subsequently burned) in the correct order. Once all the tracks are copied, right click on the CD drive and select Write these files to CD and follow any on screen prompts. The windows media player should open, listing the tracks. Click on the record button at top right to start burning the CD What CD types are suitable: Since no CD-R (audio) blank discs were to hand, a test was made with an ordinary CD-R. The ability to play this depended on the age and capability of the CD player being used. Another test was done with a Sony 1-4x speed CD-RW blank disc because a web search showed one hit that Sony megachangers could read a CD-RW when they had problems with CD-R (audio) discs. This disc was quite promising so a cheaper 12x speed CD-RW was tried but this proved to be unplayable. So the lesson appears to be to use a 1-4x speed high quality CD-RW (such as Sony).

To sum up: If you have a suitable PC, making reasonable transfers from LPs and cassettes to CD's is not that difficult and the costs involved are to purchase a Y cable and blank discs.