Recording from Cassette Tape

[deaf dunderkwac]

I guess I *would* be interested in the dolby b and c decoders myself, but I'm pretty sure all my cassette tapes are permanantly damaged and glued together.
I tryed to play a couple last year with no luck (cleaning heads/transports every couple of minutes and watching the tape shed right before my eyes)
Alot of irreplaceable material but life goes on (just my crappy music anyways)

[shanecgriffo]

ahh, the humble cassette, dont worry one day it will make a comeback...




















not!

[himalaya]

another bit of software to check out is virtos noise wizard.

never seen that one before,is it any good?

2 more;
voxengo redunoise?

kn0ck0ut

I've used Virtos plugs on many live recordings, cleaning all sorts of noise: ambient, mic self-noise, noisy mixer mic amps, tape hiss, etc, but now use Voxengo's Redunoise, which to my ears produces better results ( read: more natural). Redunoise can take some skill to produce the natural effect only because there is so many options, but the effort is worthwhile, IMHO.

If I were to choose from all the plugins mentioned here, I would go for Redunoise, except for Cedar, of course.

[himalaya]

As a matter of fact and coincidence, I'm now doing a transfer from a cassette album produced in 1996. It's all spoken word , and does it need noise reduction ( and pitch correction ) !

[deaf dunderkwac]

ah cassettes
such a format
yet it was better than an 8-track

[WoJ]

I dont get it, if ADAT and large studio tapes are still used and are such good quality ( i think?) why were tape cassettes not?

With tapes you can have a whole two sides! plus you get all of that 'vintage warmth'.

WoJ

[deaf dunderkwac]

adat = digital
cassettes are analog on a tiny strip of tape (less then 1/4th of a tiny strip 1/8" of tape at really slow speeds of 1 7/8" per secound)
impossible to get decent S/N on an analog tape with those specs. Any minor problems in the tape transport was impressed upon the signal wow and flutter etc.
They used *very* hot tapes to get any signal to noise specs at all, which meant the tapes regularly printed through, which meant the dolby would mistrack which meant (blah blah blah)

[opia]

I have some old classical recordings I just can't seem to locate as CD's and that are discontinued so I need to transfer them to CD myself. I've recorded them to Wav but now I need to process them to remove some background hiss and occasional crackles but I don't want to damage the sensitivity and detail of the recordings in any way? I'm thinking of something I can feed a sample of the background hiss (say by playing it one of the bits between the songs) and teach it to pick out just that - then subtract it from the whole wav. Is this possible?

dunno if its been mentioned yet but 'magix audio cleaning' had something like that
you recorded a snippet of the noise and used it in the noise reduction

[aMUSEd]

OK I'm having a fair amount of success using noise reduction then a harmonic exciter/eq but I find the exciter tends to add a bit of hiss back again so I thought I'd the Spectralive demo instead which says it doesn't add hiss. I'm not used to this mastering lark though - I was thinking about doing this in Tracktion so I could use Finalmix but should I use Finalmix then Spectralive or Spectralive then Finalmix? Logically I'd have thought its best to put the exciter last to add a touch of "sparkle" but then Final mix does say "final" so I'm not sure.

[Sascha Franck]

I don't know Finalmix, but personally I'd just live with a bit of noise and less than stellar audio quality. It'll always remind you of the good old days (and hey, yes, I'm serious) when one created mix tapes for the girls one fell in love with and such.
So, I'd just use a little noise reduction and another little high shelving EQ. At least that's what I did.