There are many ways to convert tapes to CD -- the cheapest solution is to use the Line In your computer to connect to a cassette player and then use a audio recording software on the computer to record the tapes played through the cassette player. But that is very time consuming and breaking into individual tracks can be a daunting task. Years ago, I discovered "The World's First Tape to CD Converter" TASCAM CC-222 MK II which helped convert my thousands of tapes into AAC format. Here is the Amazon review I wrote for it:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A30AXUOZHZ1T61?ie=UTF8&sort_by=MostRecentReviewProduct web site:
http://www.tascam.com/Products/CC-222.htmlIt's sad that Amazon doesn't sell that product anymore. You can get it from Guitar Center or even from eBay.
Here goes the review...
Finally, a solution for music fans with a pile of cassettes!, April 8, 2005
Eversince my 60 GB iPod photo gave me the power of carrying a great part of my music collection anywhere I go, I was getting more greedy and looking for an easy mechanism to digitize my 1000+ cassette collection. I am quite happy that my search has reached an important milestone with TASCAM CC-222MKII (referred to as CC-222 henceforth).
CC-222 is presently the only equipment that converts music from tape to CD directly. Since it has autoreverse tape deck and an automatic track creation feature, a large number of cassettes can be converted with minimum effort.
CC-222 has many other recording features but I focus entirely on the tape-to-CD aspect in this review. You can download the user manual and technical specs from the company website:
www.tascam.comGood points:
+ Easy to operate; the user manual is concise but covers all aspects clearly
+ Has a helpful remote control
+ High quality conversion from tape to CD; has DOLBY NR;
+ Automatically recognizes the gap between songs in the tape and makes multiple tracks in the CD
+ Also has a manual mode in which it leaves the track marking to the user - this could be useful for converting cassette that contain something other than standard music songs
+ High quality display that is very informative
+ Lot of recording options that are easy to customize
+ Entire cassette can be converted with the push of a single button (auto-reverse)
+ Music converted to digital format is stored in its internal buffer (I guess hard disc) that doesn't go away even if you switch off the unit by mistake
+ Supports all CD-R/CD-RW discs with capacities ranging from 650 MB to 800 MB
+ Music from more than one cassette could be recorded on a CD-R to fill up all the available space on the CD [multiple recording steps]
+ For a CD-RW, it is possible to just erase the table of contents and record more tracks in case there is space
+ Selected tracks can be erased from a CD-RW; also, we can erase the entire disk at once with ERASE DISC or REFRESH DISC option
+ Writes CDs in AIFF format that is supported by most CD players, as well as iTunes/iPod
Bad points:
- Insufficient documentation about technical details
- Though not indicated in the documentation, CC-222 can only record a maximum of 76 minutes at a time (so, you can't convert a 90 minutes tape into a 90-minute CD in one shot). This was a BIG disappointment for me.
- It is good in recognizing the beginning of a song, but not the end of it -for example, the last track in your cassette might result in a track that has a long silence at the end of it
- Doesn't have an optical sensor for the cassette player (like some other TASCAM players). An optical sensor would have reduced the time to change the sides as well as prevent the possibility of tape getting ripped off while being rowound or forwarded)
- Support staff not very helpful
If you are importing the CDs digitized through CC-222 into iTunes, it is better to turn off the "On CD Insert Import & Eject" feature so that you could choose the tracks to be imported. There are cases where the long silences between songs or at the beginning/end of the tape become tracks in the CD. Also, there may be cases where the silence that was part of a song results in the song getting broken into multiple tracks. In such cases, "Join CD Tracks" in iTunes becomes very handy. I wish iTunes also had a way to split tracks and join non-adjacent tracks as well.
CC-222 also has the following features which I didn't experiment with:
* Recording from CD to tape
* SYNC recording to record live audio directly into CD or tape
* OPTICAL input
* PHONO input for turn-table
* RCA output for speaker
* Miniplug output for headphone
Overall, I am very pleased with CC-222 and would highly recommend it to music fans who are willing to generously spend for converting their cassettes into CD.
