[Dieter Britz[_3_]]

I have a number of grammophone records, cassette tapes and minidisks that
I want to encode into mp3. I bought a cheap gadget from Amazon that did
the trick, but it stopped working, displaying "nil" on the little screen.
No one can tell me how to get past this - maybe it's broken. The manual
doesn't mention the condition. There is a similar one sold in Hong Kong
but I can't seem to buy it, living in Denmark.

What is the best way to do this, what good gadgets are available,
for converting, say, the sound out of a phone jack into an mp3 file?

There seems to be a lot of software for this, making use of the audio
input of a PC, but how good can that be? My attempts with Audio Grabber
were not very successful.

Any advice would be appreciated.
--
Dieter Britz

[Buzz]

"Dieter Britz" a écrit dans le message de news:
...
I have a number of grammophone records, cassette tapes and minidisks that
I want to encode into mp3. I bought a cheap gadget from Amazon that did
the trick, but it stopped working, displaying "nil" on the little screen.
No one can tell me how to get past this - maybe it's broken. The manual
doesn't mention the condition. There is a similar one sold in Hong Kong
but I can't seem to buy it, living in Denmark.

What is the best way to do this, what good gadgets are available,
for converting, say, the sound out of a phone jack into an mp3 file?

There seems to be a lot of software for this, making use of the audio
input of a PC, but how good can that be? My attempts with Audio Grabber
were not very successful.

Any advice would be appreciated.
--
Dieter Britz
================================================== ==================
You might find some ideas here :
http://www.a-reny.com/iexplorer/restauration.html

--
Allen RENY
www.a-reny.com

[Doug Freyburger]

Dieter Britz wrote:

I have a number of grammophone records, cassette tapes and minidisks that
I want to encode into mp3. I bought a cheap gadget from Amazon that did
the trick, but it stopped working, displaying "nil" on the little screen.
No one can tell me how to get past this - maybe it's broken. The manual
doesn't mention the condition. There is a similar one sold in Hong Kong
but I can't seem to buy it, living in Denmark.

What is the best way to do this, what good gadgets are available,
for converting, say, the sound out of a phone jack into an mp3 file?

There seems to be a lot of software for this, making use of the audio
input of a PC, but how good can that be? My attempts with Audio Grabber
were not very successful.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Sotware -

Audacity is freeware. I saw it was the recommended software for
volunteers on vibrivox.org to use with microphones and have used it for
more than that since. But so far I've only used it with USB devices.

Hardware -

We're now on our second box that reads cassettes and produces USB. I
think the first one still works but it's packed in some box in storage.
;^) The first one is the design of an old dual tape cassette deck with
a USB circuit added. It came with some crappy brute force software.
The second one is a small Walkman clone with a USB circuit. Tastes
great, less filling.

[Dave Platt]

I have a number of grammophone records, cassette tapes and minidisks that
I want to encode into mp3. I bought a cheap gadget from Amazon that did
the trick, but it stopped working, displaying "nil" on the little screen.
No one can tell me how to get past this - maybe it's broken. The manual
doesn't mention the condition. There is a similar one sold in Hong Kong
but I can't seem to buy it, living in Denmark.

What is the best way to do this, what good gadgets are available,
for converting, say, the sound out of a phone jack into an mp3 file?

There seems to be a lot of software for this, making use of the audio
input of a PC, but how good can that be? My attempts with Audio Grabber
were not very successful.

It depends to a great extent on the quality of the PC's audio input.

Many PCs have rather terrible on-board "sound card" interfaces - good
enough for teleconferencing but not of a quality high enough that I'd
want to use them to digitize any material of significance.

You can buy PC sound cards of much higher quality, though... both
actual cards (e.g. PCI), and USB interfaces. On the PCI side, an old
Creative Labs SoundBlaster PCI would do the trick. If you want to buy
new and USB, the Behringer UFO202 is a current product designed for
just this purpose, it's not expensive, and it comes with a copy of the
free Audacity software which will handle the capture and
restoration/editing for you.

With a good PC audio interface, and enough care in doing the wiring
that you don't set up ground loops which would cause hum, you can do a
data-capture onto disk in which the PC hardware's audio quality isn't
anywhere near the limiting factor - the source material will be.

I would recommend capturing the data into .WAV format for easy
editing. To archive, it, compress to FLAC format (this is a
"lossless" process, 100% reversable) and burn it onto CD-R. Then,
compress to MP3 format or to Ogg Vorbis (if your player will handle
that) at whatever bit rate you find appropriate.

The capture process doesn't require a lot of horsepower, or at least
it shouldn't. I've captured many hours of LP transcription, with nary
a glitch, using an old junker of a machine (Pentium 166 or so, 64 MB
of RAM) running a console Linux distribution.

With Windows you may need to be a bit careful, to make sure that you
don't have a whole bunch of background tasks (e.g. virus scanners,
automatic software updaters) grabbing the system and disk away from
you during the capture, and causing a loss of data.

The actual MP3 (or Ogg Vorbis) compression process is CPU intensive,
so faster machines will do it more quickly.

--
Dave Platt AE6EO
Friends of Jade Warrior home page: http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior
I do _not_ wish to receive unsolicited commercial email, and I will
boycott any company which has the gall to send me such ads!

[isw]

In article ,
(Dave Platt) wrote:

I have a number of grammophone records, cassette tapes and minidisks that
I want to encode into mp3. I bought a cheap gadget from Amazon that did
the trick, but it stopped working, displaying "nil" on the little screen.
No one can tell me how to get past this - maybe it's broken. The manual
doesn't mention the condition. There is a similar one sold in Hong Kong
but I can't seem to buy it, living in Denmark.

What is the best way to do this, what good gadgets are available,
for converting, say, the sound out of a phone jack into an mp3 file?

There seems to be a lot of software for this, making use of the audio
input of a PC, but how good can that be? My attempts with Audio Grabber
were not very successful.

It depends to a great extent on the quality of the PC's audio input.

And to the quality of the MP3 encoding software. To be "legally"
encoded, all that is necessary is that the MP3 stream have the proper
syntax, and that it not break when run through a "reference" decoder
(which is a piece of software). Nothing at all about how it sounds.

Apple has always used decent encoders, and Audacity uses (or used to
use) the lame encoder, which is good too. Others, I don't know about.

Isaac