A Voice from the Dust

That title sounds familiar.  I get an occasional Bulletin from World Vital Records. This one had an interesting Post.

I have done this in a not so sophisticated manner that worked well for me.  I had a cassette tape of my son John interviewing my father-in-law H. Marco Clark.  I bought a cable for about $10 from Radio Shack.  My laptop computer sits very close to my audio player in our kitchen,  It plays 33 1/3 LP vinyl records, 45 RPM vinyl records, CD and cassette tapes.  I put the tape into the tape player and plugged one end of the cable into the earphone jack.  The other end of the cable went into the microphone input on my laptop computer. This automatically brought up a screen and I had previously downloaded a Wave Pad Sound Editor from this Site.  It is from NCH software.  They have a professional version, but I use the free version, because I do not intend to go commercial.

I started the tape and then started the Sound Editor, adjusted the volume and recorded the tape on both sides. Once I had the complete recording, I used the sound editor to stitch the two sides together,  then saved the files in MP3 format. and burned them to a CD.  After this it was easy to make a copy of the CD for each of my children and my brother-in-law and his children.

Since then, I found a neat little portable tape player at Kohl's on sale for $25.00.  It has a USB connection and comes with installation software .  It is manufactured by *ION and is labeled Tape Express.   It has the advantage that you can listen to the audio at the same time you are recording. I have used this to transfer cassette recordings of music ( I have in excess of 100 tapes) to the computer and then move them to iTunes and then have them available to transfer to my iPhone or my  wife's iPad or an iPod or other MP3 player.

About a year ago my daughter called me and asked me if I still had my old hand held Dictaphone that I used in my office in Wyoming.  It used mini cassettes.  I never throw anything away, so I dug it out.  There was a lady in her ward that had some of her grandfather's history on a few of these mini cassettes and since they were outdated she could find no one who could even find one so that she could transcribe them.  I was able to hook up the cable to my laptop as I had done before and made a CD with multiple copies for family members.