Tapes to CD??

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I have a bunch of cassette tapes to transfer to CD but frankly I'm clueless about where to start -- best hardware hookup, what software to use, how to squeeze a 90-minute tape into a 79-minute CD, you name it.
Have a 2-gig Intel IMac. The tape deck is a pretty decent H-K unit of recent vintage, which isn't saying much since they don't make casette decks like they used to <sob>.
Any help at all would be appreciated.
 
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Your Mac's Specs
13" Macbook Pro 2.26Ghz Unibody 4G RAM 160G HDD Superdrive
You need Audio Hijack Pro ($32 download) and a patch cable. Or possibly Audacity (free download) might do it for you. Hook up patch cable from line-out on tape player and other side to line-in on your Mac. Start Hijack, press record on AHP. Start tape player. Wait.

90 minutes later (or actually, two 45 minutes if your player doesn't have auto-reverse) stop the recording on AHP, and you'll now have an analog-digital stream of about 100MB depending on what format you told AHP to save (I usually use .aiff and encode down later.) That's your music file. Use Audacity to chop it up into discreete songs that you can name if you like, or trim up any dead spots (like during the auto-reverse switchover) and extra long fades as you like. Chopping a couple of songs in the stream to include on the next CD will probably make it so you can fit that 90 minutes on a 79 minute CD. In fact depending on the tapes I'd probably end up putting those songs in an 'orphan bin' folder until they added up to a CD of their own. Anway, Import this resultant file into iTunes, burn Audio CD. Repeat for next tape.

There's a lot of stuff out there to manipulate music files for the Mac, the initial trick is getting it over from the analog source into the Mac. You might want to experement with levels (I would make some initial test recordings and then load them up in Audacity to see what the wave form looked like, then turn down either the player or fiddle with the levels on AHP.)

I've been manipulating music files with these simple tools for a couple of years now, so I've gotten pretty good at it lately, but I remember what it was like when first starting to play around with the songs.
 

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