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Audio Conversion
Choosing the Right Tape Cassette Player
Which Tape Cassette to PC Set Up is Right For Me?
Dedicated Tape to PC Coverter or DIY Tape Conversion Kit
Dedicated, Soundcard or DIY Tape Converter?
Since we've already looked at the very basics of tape cassette care and maintenance, let's move on to the practicalities of choosing an audio conversion set-up that is right for you. The basic choice of tape cassette player for transferring tape cassette to PC is between dedicated Tape-to-PC players which provide all the hardware and software you need; in-between products which provide a soundcard, plus software, but for which you need your own player, and DIY kits which can be very inexpensive and lots of fun too.
Dedicated tape to PC converters like the Ion Tape 2 PC are the more expensive choice, but all you need is there and all you need supply are the tapes. If you are short on time, these may be the simplest way to get started.
Some products do not include the player, but instead have an external soundcard to which you connect your player. This is the case with the Magix Rescue Your Vinyl and Tapes for instance. The obvious advantage here is that you can plug in a record player or a tape player.
The third option is one of the many DIY kits available - these rely on the fact that PCs already have a soundcard which should be adequate for transferring tapes, records and other sources to PC. Laptops also have built-in soundcards, although sometimes not as good for audio transfer as PCs. DIY kits will usually be the cheapest option and someone with a good deal of audio experience may be able to put one together for less than £10.00 and for that price - be able to record tapes, records etc.
With such a wide choice, there should be something to suit pretty much everyone.
Tape Cassette Players: DIY Knowhow
Assuming that you are not looking for a dedicated tape to PC player, what factors should affect your choice of tape cassette player?
Auto-reverse
One difference between listening to a tape cassette and transferring a tape cassette to MP3 is that you may not necessarily want to listen to the tape playing and may prefer instead to listen to the completed recording.
The need to leave the player unattended means that auto-reverse comes into it's own - you can go away and leave both sides to record one after the other. This also means that you should set auto-reverse to come to a stop after both sides have played, otherwise if the tape becomes jammed, the player which continue endlessly flipping sides and mash your tape ribbon into the audio equivalent of origami in the process. And not a very attractive form of origami at that.
Apart from that there is not really much to recommend one player over another. You may find that with a tape cassette which is playing up very slightly, a mains-driven player may handle it better than a small portable player running on say one small AAA battery.
Taking Care of Tape Cassette Players
Clean the tape head with a head cleaning tape cassette or a head cleaning kit after about 10-15 hours use. If the tape you are playing is very old, you should clean more regularly than this. This removes oxides which build up on the head during ordinary use. If you are after good quality recordings this is a chore which must not be neglected.
More on Tape Cassette Care
Do not leave tapes cassettes in direct sunlight and never put close to a radiator for any length of time.
More on DIY Kits
The man advantage of DIY kits is that they save cash - and save the hassle of trying to figure out how to use the software or which cable to get. With the cash saved it should be possible to get a good quality general purpose tape cassette player.
For real techies - those with a sound understanding of recording techniques and a reasonable grasp of digital audio, it should be possible to assemble a DIY tape to PC kit from scratch at very little cost. And it should be possible to put together pretty much any combination of connection cable, software and tape player to suit your needs.
But more on that in a future article.
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Tapes and Tape Cassette Players
How do I Transfer Tape to MP3?
Maintenance and Care of Tape Cassettes
The Basics
If cassettes tapes are well maintained, the thing most likely to damage the tapes is a faulty cassette player.
A man who owned a valued recording on cassettes decided to see if the recording was now available on MP3 or CD. He searched the net, but found nothing. Eventually he decided to buy a new cassette player. He did his reasearch and ended up buying a model from a trusted brand - an expensive one that had full logic control, auto-reverse and all the latest in sound improvement technology.
Taking his old cassettes out, he placed one in the player and listened through state of the art headphones. Beautiful. But when the side ended and tape auto-reversed, he noticed something was wrong.
The sound was not exactly garbled, but it sounded odd. Taking the cassette out to examine it he noticed that the player's roller had scored a sharp groove into the tape along it's entire length. This hadn't cut right through the tape but it had done visible and permanent damage.
Choosing the Right Tape Cassette Player
The gentleman in the story above did the right thing - he looked after his tapes well, and sought out a good quality tape cassette player from a reliable manufacturer. The player he chose had full logic control - we'll see the importance of this later on - and when a fault was suspected he didn't ignore it and took immediate action. Yet all this wasn't enough to prevent some damage to his tapes.
The key rule with any tape cassette player must be, when you notice or suspect a problem, don't ignore it. A faulty cassette player can do harm to tapes that you may not notice until quite a few tapes have been damaged. If you have a funny feeling about your player, no matter how good the brand, stop using it.
It is useful to have two players - this is sometimes the only when of answering the question: does a tape cassette not play properly because the tape is damaged or because the player is faulty.
The reality is that whilst all tapes experience minor wear and tear each and every time they are played, you shouldn't experience ANY problems the vast majority of the time.
Avoiding Tape Cassette Damage
We've all been there: you are playing a cassette, when suddenly it speeds up, slows down, then everything sounds garbled. You hit stop button and pull out the cassette to find the tape in a tangled mess. The main cause of this is failing to take up the slack before hitting the play button. You should take up the slack from a cassette tape before hitting the play button - each and every time. The usual advice is to use a six-sided pencil to reel in the slack. This is all well and good, but you can go one step further.
Chunk and Clunk vs Feather Touch.
You might have heard the expression Full Logic Control in relation to tape cassette players. Full Logic Control is also known as feather-touch or feather-light touch or some variant. This simply means that the buttons on the player activate the motor electronically. The alternative - and not always the cheap alternative either - are the old fashioned players with chunky keys which you have to press down to start the player, and where the stop button usually produces a loud clunk when you activate it. When you press the play button on a player with full logic control, it quietly whirs whilst taking any slack in the tape, and then engages the play mechanism. The Chunk and Clunk variety of players will happily destroy your tapes by the dozen unless you manually take up the slack each and every time before you press the play button.
Needless to say I recommend players with full logic control and if you find that such a player starts chewing up your tapes, get it looked at or replace it.
There will be more on choosing and maintaining tape cassette players and looking after and maintaining tape cassettes, as well as tips on getting the right set up for transferring your audio to PC, but for now, the two ideas to keep in mind are that you should always take up the slack in a tape before hitting the play button - or better yet get a player with full logic control which does it automatically, and recognise that at some stage your player will need repair or replacing - and the first indication of this may well be that it starts damaging your tape cassettes. If you bear these two things in mind, the majority of problems you might have previously experienced with tape cassettes may well vanish.
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