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 One of Brad's music teachers asked him how I managed to convert the audio cassette recording of their bands song Tomorrow's Another Day to an mp3 (see the original story here). It was pretty easy really;
The guys had already recorded the song onto an old audio cassette by plugging a Playstation microphone into a portable cassette recorder and just sitting it in front of them as they all performed.
I put that cassette in my own stereo and then used a $4 cable that had a mini stereo connector on both ends to connect the headphone socket of the stereo to the line in socket on my laptop.
I left the stereo volume at the same level I had it on for listening through the speakers and then used the Sound Recorder application that comes with Windows XP to record the whole song to a file on the laptop. The result was pretty crappy. It was too hard to get the sound levels correct.
I then did a bit of Google'ing and downloaded a free trial version of a little program called LP Recorder. I'm sure there must be heaps of free sound recording programs out there, but this one was a small download, simple to use and had stereo level meters that made setting the sound level's much easier.
LP recorder saved the file in WAV format onto my laptop hardrive. That's all well and good, but it's an uncompressed file format so the song itself was way too large to be streamed off my website. A bit more Google'ing lead me to another application called winLAME. LAME is a well known Linux based audio file encoder/decoder and winLAME is a Windows version with a pretty graphical interface. Once again it's a very simple program that took the WAV file I had already recorded on my laptop and converted it to an mp3.
Just to make sure that Brad's phone displayed the right info when he played the mp3 I then used a third free program called AudioShell to enter the artist, song name, recording date, genre etc as tags in the mp3 file.
I'm sure there must be heaps of other programs that I could have used, and many of them are probably much better than the ones that I chose. There is probably something that does everything all in one program, however this story is just to explain how I did it myself this time, next time I might do it differently.
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