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I am a carnatic music buff with a decent collection of audio

tapes, which I now want to digitise and store in my computer. I then plan to transfer the digitised files to an iPod.

The computer that I recently purchased is from the HP Pavilion series. It has an Intel Pentium 4 3.06 GHz processor, 256 MB RAM and Combo drive. It has this I/O Connector configuration:

* Front Access Ports - Three Hi-Speed USB 2.0, Microphone-In, Headphone-Out, Line-In * Rear Access Ports - Four Hi-Speed USB 2.0, One IEEE 1394, One Parallel, One RJ-11, One RJ-45, Two PS/2 ports, Audio Ports - Line-In, Audio Ports - Line-Out, Microphone-In, Surround L/R, Surround Rear L/R, Central LFE, 1VGA port and 9-in-1 Digital Media Reader.

Please tell me how I digitise my audio tapes.

I have a Sony music system with a line-out jack too.

Bharathan

To digitise your audio tapes, you need two things: a cable to connect your music system and the PC audio system, and a software to record the audio.

The cable you require depends on the Audio Out port on your music system.

Usually you will require a stereo to audio pin cable, which should have a left right stereo pin on one end to connect to your music system's "Audio Out" and an audio pin on the other end to plug into the line in of your PC.

Next you need a software to record the sound on the PC.

There is quite a lot of freeware on the Net to record audio. One good tool is "Audacity." You can download it from http://audacity.sourceforge.net/,

Please download the software and install it.

Now, to do the recording, connect the audio cable.

The stereo left and right pins should be connected to the "Audio out" of your music system and the other end (audio pin) should be connected to the "Line In" of your PC. Now start the Audacity software.

At top right, you should find a "drop down" combo box. Please click on it and select "Stereo Mix." Now click on the red record button on the tool bar and play the tape.

This will start recording, once the song is over, please stop the recording by clicking on the stop button on the tool bar and click on the File menu.

Here you have three options: to save either as WAV, MP3 or Ogg. Click on any one of these and save the song.

You can record one song at a time or the whole tape and later copy and paste the individual songs to a separate file later on.

Whole songs or sections of songs can be selected by dragging and copying and pasting into new files to be saved as individual recordings. You will need to experiment around a bit before going for the actual take.

Solution by G. Rajah

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