Music digitalization question

[Maverick]

I am now getting serious about trying to save the music we own, tapes (cassette) and CD's to our computer and hopefully to a digital playing device. I have held off dealing with it waiting for prices to come down. I am now seeing MP3 players for as little as $40 (2 gigs or 900 songs) now. Those were Sony players, not Apple I Pods. The I Pods were more expensive and held fewer songs according to the description in the store.

Here is the question. What do I need to do to take the music from the cassette tapes and convert it to MP3. I am assuming MP3 is the correct format. I also want to do the same with our CD's. Do I need to play the CD or just copy the files then transfer them to the player?

Never tried anything like this so really have no idea what to do.

[shiv]

For CDs I use Audiograbber - http://www.audiograbber.org/ - and rip to MP3.  MP3 being the most portable format - that is you can play it on most anything, including Ipods.  Windows Media will try to rip to WMA, and Itunes defaults to ACC, which not all players will play. 

Make sure when you load the CD you click the FreeDB button or it's equivalent.  Then the software will look on the Internet to identify the CD and fills in the metadata - the names of the songs, album, and artist.  You can set the format you want this in too - use something like "Track#-TrackName-ArtistName."  Looks at the Options to define the directory structure - I use MP3/Artist/Album.  Depending on your processor it should just take a few minutes per CD.  Stack em up and pop them in and out over a weekend as you're passing by the PC.

Note programs like Itunes will maintain a "music library" for you but I prefer to do that manually.  This makes it easier if you need to free up space on a hard drive later and can just move a portion of your MP3s to an external drive.

Cassettes and LPs are a lot trickier.  You need to get either a dedicated cassette or LP player  player with a USB output, or get an RCA to USB cable and then run it from the player into the soundcard and record the song in real time, and then fill in all the metadata manually.  Here's a primer:

http://www.wikihow.com/Transfer-Cassette-Tape-to-Computer

[Mustaine]

If you are serious about making data backups of your music always rip to FLAC lossless audio.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flac

From there you can use many free converters to make MP3's of you music if your player of choice doesn't support FLAC, that way you can always have a perfect original copy of the audio.

[gpwurzel]

You can use windows media player to rip cd's while you listen to them. For the tapes, I'd use a cable into your line in (you can use a higher volume and not clip it). To get rid of any pops/hisses you could try groove mechanic (free download/free ware) from here http://www.coyotes.bc.ca/DL_GM.html

wurzel