Digital Bits Technology Column QnA

Question:

I have over 1500 (Yes, 1500) 30-minute audio tapes that I want to save and make sortable. How can I covert them to perhaps a MP3 file at high speed rather than real time?

Answer:

Okay, so you have a ton of tapes, and you want to convert them at high speed. I assume you’re asking about high speed because you don’t want to wait so long for the conversion! That’s understandable, but there are reasons why I don’t recommend high-speed conversion. However, you can do it if you want. See these tape conversion options for more detail:

1) Convert the tapes yourself, at normal speeds:

Following my conversion instructions, you could indeed do this yourself, but even assuming an optimistic 45 minutes to convert and process a 30-minute tape, that would take you 1125 hours. That’s a huge commitment and a lot of labor.

2) Convert the tapes yourself, at high speeds:

You could follow my same instructions above, but (a) when recording, you can set the tape playback speed to something faster (say twice as fast as normal). Then, (b) after recording, you do some simple post-production – you’d slow down the recording (to say half as fast).

This would allow you to record at high speeds. The benefit is that you’d drastically cut your recording time. The drawback is that high-speed dubbing hurts your quality. You didn’t say what was on these tapes: if it’s just voice conversations, interviews, or lower-quality stuff, then you’re probably okay. If it’s high-quality music recordings, though, then this may not be a good option. And even at half speed, you’re still talking over 500 hours of effort.

Also know that your playback device would have to support high-speed playback. I’ve found that I can sometimes “trick” dual-cassette tape players into this. Often, such players willl have a high-speed dubbing feature. And when recording to the computer, you can initiate the high-speed dubbing – the cassette thinks you’re dubbing from cassette deck 1 to 2, but in reality you’re sending the audio to be recorded on the PC.

3) Pay someone to convert tapes for you:

These are the people with the right equipment who can convert without sacrificing fidelity. However, it’s not cheap with your number of tapes. I’m sure discounts are available for large numbers, but even still, services for this start at around $10-$15 per tape. In your case, that could be tens of thousands of dollars.

4) Purchase a professional-level cassette converter, and do it yourself:

The advantage of doing the conversion this way is that there’s no detail work involved: With a professional cassette converter, you can insert a tape, insert a CD, push a button, and walk away. Come back later and you’ll have a CD burned with your tape audio (which can then be read and stored as an MP3). Advantages are that this is probably the simplest method available, and compared to the other manual methods, this will require the least amount of effort from you. Disadvantages are the price – the unit linked above is several hundreds of dollars (however, compared to using a service for your quantity, this is still a lot cheaper).

Recommendation

I gave you various options above. But if this were my own tape collection, I’d focus only on options 3 and 4. Options 1 and 2 are just too much effort. You need either someone else to do it, or some automated system in place. Option 4 would be easy to do, but does require technical competency, would still take a lot of time on your part (even if it’s mostly just changing tapes and CDs!). Option 3 would be ideal, but is very expensive.

I personally do not have thousands of dollars to spend on a conversion service, though there may be discounts available. Also, I’d be uncomfortable sending that many tapes to just anyone. So, what I recommend first is to look locally – wherever you live (or within a reasonable driving range), see if there are cassette conversion services available. Find them, and ask them for prices. THEN tell them your quantity and ask for a discount! You might find someone willing to give you an acceptable price. If not, I’d strongly consider purchasing the professional-level converter and doing it myself.

(Disclaimer – I have not used the conversion service or the professional-level converter I linked to above. I researched and detailed those here only as examples.)

Followup:

Thanks for the info!

In fairness to you, I think I should give you some information I left out for the sake of brevity.

The recordings are tapes of 38 years of Sunday Sermons and mid-week lessons. The goal is to make it all storeable, workable, then printable. Unless you now have a different recommendation, thanks for your help.

Answer:

Thanks for the clarification, John. This does help, but doesn’t really change my recommendation, except that if there was a convenient high-speed dubbing possibility (as per option 2), your tape content should work fine as long as you don’t mind a loss in quality.

>The goal is to make it all storeable, workable, then printable.

The first two goals are relatively easy. They take time, but the process is straightforward. That last one though – that’s a doozy. You could always pay a cheap intern to manually transcribe for you. Or you could experiment with voice recognition software – play the voice recording into software like Dragon NaturallySpeaking, and have it automatically transcribe. This is far from perfect, though. There would still be followup work to clean up the transcribed text, but it’s possible and may (I say ‘may’!) be much faster than manual transcription, assuming you have high-quality recordings. If not, you may be out of luck with a software solution.

Another thought struck me: If all you’re concerned about is getting this transcribed, you could forget about digitizing anything – just go straight from the cassette to the transcription process, either through hiring someone, or by experimenting with Dragon NaturallySpeaking. If you *do* want to have MP3s available, though, then I still stand by my earlier recommendations.

Other articles related to this topic:

• Cassette tape high speed dubbing
• High-speed dubbing with Audacity
• VHS to DVD recording speed recommendation
• VHS to DVD high speed dubbing
• VHS to DVD conversion questions