Cassette Tapes to MP3 and CD

My first foray into recovering old audio tapes began with my Mac PowerBook pro. It was nice,. but lacked quality audio processing. I attempted to use Audacity, but was ultimately disappointed. All X apps under OSeX are never quite the same as running on Linux. Similarly, No other GUI is quite the same as OSeX. (which I do dearly love, an it has it’s distinct place in my heart.)

After the abrupt, sudden, unexpected, suprise, lightning, disturbing and confusing end of a five year professional relationship and my job, I found myself w/o said MacBook Pro. I still needed to recover a growing collection of audio tapes made on poor-quality equipment from live meetings where a man named Jim Sepulveda spoke.

A lot of people met Jim and were amazed by things that happened around him. I had a brief chance to get to know him. Just hanging out with him changed my life. There are aspects of life that you cannot fully express in writing. He was a walking man who had a presence that seemed to bend reality. The impossible knelt in the face of the One whose power covered Jim’s life.

Back on Linux, the first step was Audacity. I have never seen or used a more capable audio processing tool on native X. I have read stories about some, but I needed free. Plusdeck would be my recommendation, after reading reviews.

I found a howto on audio conversion, and it was useful for many steps in the process. Alsa made things handy by playing back whatever came in the Mic.

Audacity

Step 1: record
The recording process went pretty well, apart from mechanical failure and a tape player bent on consuming the precious samples. It was literally point-and-click. I ran a couple tests, monitoring the first few minutes of each tape. I adjusted the volume until the peaks were well-below the top of the db-meter.

Step 2: refine
I put each side of the tape into a different project - which Audacity makes easy by allowing multiple windows to be open simultaneously. I visually gauged the db-meter for each project, and kept it about the same. (Remember: I am using normalize to cleanup the projects). I trimmed the excess lead-in and trailing noise.

Step 3: export
After the refinement, I cut some of the useless talk from the front. These were informal meetings and had people introducing Jim, but failed to convey anything useful to the presentations. I used the ‘Export Selection’ feature.

Step 4: normalize
Since this is a side-show quality attempt, I used the ‘mix’ mode of normalize. After processing each tape through steps 1 - 3, I ran normalize on all of the wav output.

normalize -m *wav

Step 5:CD-Audio Conversion

for x in *wav; do
     sox ${x} ${x/wav\$/cdr\$}
done

Step 6: Burn

First I had to create a Table of Contents (TOC). This file is short and self evident.

CD_DA

TRACK AUDIO
AUDIOFILE "JimSepulveda-Healing+7-side1.cdr" 0

TRACK AUDIO
AUDIOFILE "JimSepulveda-Healing+7-side2.cdr" 0

mktoc.py

#!/usr/bin/python                                                                                                                     
import sys


HEADER="CD_DA\n"
TRAC='TRACK AUDIO\nAUDIOFILE "%s" 0\n'


print "%s" % HEADER
for x in sys.argv[1:]:
    print "%s" % TRAC % x
    continue

Step 6:Burning

./mktoc.py *wav > TOC
cdrdao write TOC

So, that’s it.