Converting tapes and vinyl LPs to MP3s
Last updated: December 9, 2009.
If your house is
anything like mine, your music collection might be starting to
resemble a museum of audio technology. You've got vinyl LPs and
magnetic
cassette tapes, compact discs and DVDs,
and sound recordings in
virtually every other format you can think of. The only thing you're
lacking is wax cylinders and an Edison phonograph. What's worse,
maybe you no longer have a gramophone or tape recorder and all your old
music is stacked away in a cupboard. To make this even more galling, you've
probably got an iPod or MP3
player—the very latest digital musical
technology—but no way to access the music you bought in analog
form before it came along. Fortunately, there's a solution: you can
easily convert your old music collection into digital format using an
external sound card like a Griffin iMic. It's as easy as pie to put
all your old music onto your shiny new iPod. Here's how...
Photo: Left: Walkmans like this used to be the
height of technology. Now they're museum pieces. It's time to move yourself
to the 21st century! Right: An Edison phonograph. If you're still listening to music on one
of these, something is definitely wrong!
© Copyright and copywrong: a word of warning!
Before we go any
further, let me add a few words of obligatory legal verbiage. Strictly speaking, making a digital copy of a tape or LP
record is a
violation of copyright law in most countries unless you own the
copyright of the original recording.
If all you're doing is
transferring or backing up your own music collection (bought with
your own money) onto your MP3 player, for your own personal use and
quiet enjoyment, making a copy like this should be a legitimate fair use.
It's not fair use if you share any MP3 files you make with other
people. We do not support unfair practices that deprive musicians of
their livelihood. It's not nice to steal music and hurt musicians who
struggle to make a living. Then again, copyright is a complex issue.
It's not that nice to run big multinational publishing companies that cheat
artists with unfair contracts. The issue has two sides and it's
a complex debate. We're simply describing technology here; we're not
encouraging or condoning music piracy. It's up to
you to establish that what you intend to do is legal, honest, ethical, and above board
in your country, state, or jurisdiction.
For a fuller discussion of the
thorny music copyright issue, from both points of view, we recommend
you refer to:
Why it's hard to record onto your PC
Making a sound recording with a PC sounds easy. Most Windows PCs
have a program called Sound Recorder that lets you record sounds from the microphone
socket. So in theory, all you have to do is connect something like a
Walkman cassette player or LP record player to your PC's microphone
socket, play your record or tape, and start Sound Recorder to capture
the sound, right? Wrong! The trouble is, most PCs have only mono sound input, even
though they have stereo sound cards. Even if you play stereo sound
into the microphone socket, the best you can record will be mono.
Recording in stereo
To make a stereo recording, you need an external sound card that supports
stereo input from a microphone. I bought a great little sound card made by Griffin
called an iMic. It's about the size (and weight) of two
digestive biscuits stacked on top of one another and it has a couple
of input sockets and a short USB lead coming out of it. You simply
connect the output from your record player or Walkman to the iMic's
input socket and plug the USB lead into your PC (or Mac). Stereo
sound will travel via the iMic directly to your PC's stereo sound
card—and you'll be able to hear it (and record it) in stereo.
Obviously you have to play the entire tape or LP to record in this way, so
converting a large music collection to MP3 can take quite some time.
But it's a good excuse to listen to music you've not heard for a while.
Caption: Left: Turning a tape into an MP3. You simply connect the headphone output
from the Walkman (the yellow/green player) to the iMic (the silver
circle on the right), and feed the output lead from the iMic into your computer with a USB
plug. The computer's running Audacity. You can connect any audio equipment using this method,
not just cassette tape players.
Right: A closeup of the Griffin iMic. As well as recording sounds onto
your computer from an external audio player, you can also play sound from your computer through the iMic into
speakers or headphones, so it's a simple way to restore sound to your
computer if your sound card has stopped working.
Windows Sound Recorder isn't up to the job of making decent stereo
recordings, but there's a
great little free program called
Audacity that will do the job for
you. With Audacity, you can save sound files in a variety of formats
and even use a plug-in called LAME
(which jokingly stands for "LAME Ain't an MP3 Encoder") to convert those files into digital music
formats such as MP3 and Ogg. Audacity is amazingly versatile. You can
use it to record an entire album of songs, played from your tape
player, as a single sound file. Then you simply mark the start and
end of each sound track with your cursor and it'll convert that one
huge sound file into a dozen (or however many) separate MP3 files,
one for each track. But don't forget, unless you
own the rights to
the music, you're breaking the law if you share or distribute any
digital files you make this way.
What about those all-in-one gadgets?
You can also buy record decks and tape players with built-in MP3 converters.
According to the advertisements, you just play the record or tape, and press
a button to make your MP3. I've not tried using one of these and I don't think
I'd really recommend using one unless you're not very technical.
Buying one of these gadgets is up to 10 times more expensive than buying an iMic.
If you already have a good LP record player or tape recorder, why buy another one?
Using an iMic is reasonably easy. It installs itself automatically
on Windows XP and Vista and it will plug into anything with a headphone output
socket (literally anything). Audacity isn't that intuitive to use and does take a little bit of mastering, but it's not rocket science.
Maybe try the iMic method first and if that fails, get yourself the auto-converter turntable or tape player
machine afterwards?
