Dr Guiyuan Lei
University of Newcastle
Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom
There are still many audio books which are recorded as cassettes, it is nice if we can make digital files for these cassettes so that we can play these audio books in computer, mp3-player and CD-player. The following is my experience in making digital audio book from cassette. The softwares that you need are available in Windows (For burning CD, you need Windows XP if you don't use extra software).
Use sound recorder to record cassette/tape
The Sound Recorder in Windows is a simple but useful software for recording cassette.
Use a cable to connect the output of cassecate player (phone) and the line-in socket of sound card.
Run the software of Sound Recorder, in the "Edit" menu, choose "audio properties", in the window of "Audio Properties", click "Volume" for "Sound recording" and a new window of "Recording control" opened, check the "Line-in"
Increasing The Maximum Recording Time
Sound Recorder included with Windows has a default maximum time of 60 seconds of continuous recording. If you stop recording at any point before reaching the 60 second limit, you can then continue recording and have another 60 seconds of continuous time before Sound Recorder automatically stops. You can repeat this start-stop routine indefinitely if you need to record a long passage as one file.
Here's an alternate method to increase the maximum recording time in Sound Recorder: Make sure your microphone is muted so it will not pick up sound.
Click Record, and then let Sound Recorder run for 60 seconds (recording silence). After Sound Recorder stops recording, click Save As on the File menu, and name the file Blank.wav.
To increase the maximum recording time in Sound Recorder, click Insert File on the Edit menu, and then insert the Blank.wav file that you saved. When you do this, the maximum recording time is increased by 60 seconds. You can repeat this step once for each additional minute of recording time that you want to add.
Open the blanket file which has enough length for your tape, play the tape and click "record" button to start recording. After the tape is finished, you can choose "delete after current position" from "Edit" menu to cut the file as exact lenth of your recorded sound. Save the file as another name, the default file type is .wav file.
Use Windows' sound recorder to convert .wav to .mp3
The deault file format when record cassette/tape in Sound Recorder is .wav, you can specify quality in the File menu, click Properties, a dialog box will appear. Recording formats is for recording. If you've already recorded your voice at high-quality, you probably ended up with some large files. To reduce the file size of existing recordings, specify Playback formats and save the file as new file.
You can also convert .wav file to .mp3 file so that you can play the audio book with mp3-player, .mp3 file is also much smaller than .wav file.
Run sound recorder software from "all programs" -> "accessories" -> "entertainment"
Open .wav file
From "File" menu, select "Save as..."
In the "Save as" window, click "Change..." for format, in the "Sound Selection" window, choose "MPEG layer-3" for format, you can also choose attribute here to reduce the quality of music. Then click "ok" to return to "Save as" window. In the "Save as type:", select "all files" instead of "Sounds(*.wav)", click "Save" to finish, the .wav file will be converted to .mp3 file. Done!
Burn CD using Window's Media Player
It is very easy to use Windows XP Media Player to Burn CD, even if you have mp3 format files, they’ll be converted to .cda format, too, so you can play them in an ordinary CD player
Load a blanket CD, open Windows Media Player, draw the list of audio files (you may need to name these files to order them) into Windows Media Player, Click "Burn", you will get a CD in a few minutes.
Ripper mp3 from CD or copy CD
When you load a CD, Windows XP pops up a message box asking what you want to do with it - Do you want to play it? Do you want to copy it? Or do you want to ripper it? Just select what you want to do. You can sepcify what kind of format do you want the CD be ripped in Tools-Options menu (mp3 or other format).
Last modified:
20 October, 2006