Best way to 'record' an original tape

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Maff970
Posts: 4
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 3:27 pm

Best way to 'record' an original tape

Post by Maff970 »

Hi all,
My Dragon 32 that I've had since childhood is well loved - it's got a uDW drive and all the things it could have never of dreamt of back in the day.,,

A few years ago, must have been on an older PC - I managed to sample some of my old tapes and create wav/mp3 files which would load on my Dragon through windows media player. I've spent all night here in Melbourne trying to 'dub' an adventure game I wrote myself - it still remarkably loads from tape!

What's to right format to capture this - I've tried playing the cassette into my mic input on the PC - no joy - every resulting file doesn't even resemble the original,,,,

Any help please? :)
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robcfg
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Joined: Sat Apr 04, 2009 10:16 pm
Location: Stockholm, Sweden
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Re: Best way to 'record' an original tape

Post by robcfg »

Hi!

Use the line in input on your pc instead of the mic input, and use a program like Audacity or Golwave to record the tapes.

Watch the recording level and adjust the volume so that it doesn't go higher than 75-80%.

Not much more to it.

You can also upload your file so we can examine it.

Cheers,
Rob
prime
Posts: 266
Joined: Fri Apr 10, 2009 1:40 am

Re: Best way to 'record' an original tape

Post by prime »

Though I did manage to sample from the mic input of my laptop last night, with the volume on my tape deck (Radio Shack CCR-81) set to about 2.

But as Rob says you need to first check to see what the right input level is by monitoring on the PC to get the correct output volume level.

Used Audacity on windows to record the WAV and then Xroar to convert to a CAS file.

Cheers.

Phill.
Alastair
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Joined: Fri Jul 18, 2008 11:33 pm

Re: Best way to 'record' an original tape

Post by Alastair »

In addition to all of the advice given above another thing to watch out for is automatic gain. Windows used to have this switched on as a default setting, versions more recent than XP may still have this as the default, you want to switch it off. The link below is to the instructions on how to switch off automatic gain in XP that I posted five years ago, I'm not sure how useful the instructions are for other versions of Windows.

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=725&p=3705#p3705
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