History
This project has been 20 years in the making. Digitizing the cassette tapes was one of my very first digitizing projects. This started in 1991-1992. I was home for winter break from college, and in truth was looking for a way to kill time. With 2 weeks to kill, and all of my friends out of touch (Hello, pre internet, pre email, pre text message era), I stumbled on my Dad's record collection.
Dad had always been into music and had a high quality record player and tape deck. While he had tapered off new purchases by that time, he still had about 3' of albums on a shelf in the closet. While I was sure I had heard "most" of the songs, I was also sure that I had not heard "all" of the songs. And so a new project was born.
Given a 2 week window, I knew that there was no way I would listen to every single song, but I figured I could listen to at least 10 seconds of every song, and they write down which I wanted to listen to all of the song. Then I decided, that if I was going to listen to the entire song anyway, I might as well record it to cassette while I did so.
And so 2 weeks later, I was in possession of 7 cassette tapes. To put this into context. In 1990, finding old music was incredibly difficult. There was no Amazon, No EBay, and no YouTube. If the album was out of print, tough luck.
And so these would sit on my shelf for a decade as I waited for technology to catch up.
Digitization
Forward to about 2001. I had become enamored with the idea of digitizing my entire CD collection so that I could play it on the computer. At that time I had about 1,000 CD's and realized that I was not listening to a large part of my music collection because it was just forgotten. The idea was to digitize everything and then press the random button and see what played next..
This worked wonderfully..
Then, I remembered the cassette tapes I had recorded years before and said "hummm"..
So I started the process of digitizing all of my cassette tapes. Even in 2001, I understood that the only tapes I should focus on should be those that were not commercial tapes. Sooner or later, every Top 40 song would be re-released so what I should focus on was all the rest. This left about 40 cassettes which included not only my Dad's albums, but multiple choir concerts I had been a part of in the past.
What does that mean?
All of these songs were digitized in the 2000's, using 2001 technology. But before you freak out, you need to understand exactly what that means.
Recording from cassette to computer requires a good cassette player, a mixer, a good sound card, and good software for the post processing.
Cassette players have not changed, nor mixers, and sound cards have arguably gotten worse. Software might be better, but to be honest, 50 year old ears are not as good as 30 year old ears. The software still requires you to adjust the amount of processing so that you are sure that the tape hiss is gone, but the sound recording is kept. This part is and will always be a subjective part of the process. If I were to do this now, I would cut out some higher frequency sound that I can no longer hear.
Specs
But enough of that, how about some numbers?
All of these were recorded in Stereo, playing from a JVS cassette player to WAV in stereo at CD Quality (1,411 kbps). A mixer/amp was used between the stereo and computer to adjust volume. The files were then processed in (Lost to Time) Software and saved to MP3 at 192kps. "State of the Art 2001" software tools were used to remove tape hiss, and normalize sound. The most difficult part was the normalization.
Even in 2001 I was very concerned to not lose any sound data, and tried very hard to never process the sound to a point past where I could still hear the tape hiss. The idea being that if I could still hear the tap hiss, I was not cutting out to much of the high frequency sound. Sadly at 48, I can no longer hear any tape hiss, which indicates my hearing has decreased since then.