Cleaning up old analogue tapes and converting to digital

sockdrawer

I'm involved with our local history trust, and currently transcribing old tapes which were made in the 70s 80s and 90s.
There's a lot of noise in the background, and some of the voices are really unclear.
Is there a way to clarify them? If so, how would I go about it/what equipment would I need?
The other thing I wanted to ask was, is there any way to convert these original tapes to digital so they could be available online or could be sent via e-mail/burnt cd to interested people?
I'm sorry if I've got the terminology wrong, but I'm a bit of a beginner in this type of thing. I hope someone knows what I mean and can help.

isabel.h

buy a second hand dvd recorder and link a video player and then record direct to dvd, this is how i copied my old videos to dvd, not sure how to clean up though, hope this helps

Nilrem

The easiest way to start to clean them up (and to author them for DVD's properly) would be to get a reasonable quality Analogue, or Digita'/Analogue TV card for a computer (prices start at around £30ish*), connect the VCR up to the TV card and that should let you copy them to the PC.
You can also get external USB adaptors that do much the same thing and are marketed at specifically this sort of area, but they are much more likely to cause issues (being USB based they tend to be a little more dependent on the connected PC's CPU, and I believe may not work with all software).

From there your options for cleaning up/making DVD's/posting on-line are limited primarily on the software you're using, and how much time you can spend on them - you can make a quick and dirty DVD for playback in a couple of hours for the first disc (then minutes per additional copy - either from a saved version on the PC or a straight DVD to DVD copy).
It would also let you convert from the copy stored on the PC to versions that are better suited for on-line use.

I'm not sure what the best software for cleaning up would be, but any DVD writing software (and I think windows 7 itself) should be able to make a DVD playable in most modern players that can cope with DVDR's.

This is assuming your VHS tapes are not commercial ones with macrovision, which will stop easy copying.


*I paid about £80 a few years back for an all singing and dancing analogue one, but analogue only ones should be dropping in price like a rock at the moment as more and more areas g fully digital.

Painkiller

Can you confirm that you are asking about audio cassette tapes rather than video tapes?

closed

plug cassette deck into line-in on a pc/laptop, record with sound recorder (vista onwards), or audacity, then

http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Noise_Removal

then convert to mp3 or burn to cd as wav

NiVZ

Hello,

You might want to try something like this:

http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=280934

This will convert the cassette audio to digital mp3 on your computer.

To clean the audio up, I use Nero Wave Editor which has a great Noise analysing and reduction feature.

NiVZ

googler

As regards merely transcribing the tapes (listening to them in order to write them down, I assume) then the simplest way to clarify would be to reduce the bass and boost treble. If you're playing back with a standard HiFi amp it should have tone controls. Play around with these.

I assume they're being played back on a tape or cassette recorder in good condition, with cleaned heads. If the tapes were recorded on other machines, there may be scope for adjusting the azimuth on the playback machine to optimise it to the tape.

As regards transferring them to digital, it might help to know what gear you have already before anyone recommends any more.


If clarity is a priority for you, then ignore all advice given above about storing as/converting to mp3. Do that, and you'll undo any good work that you've done up to that point.

robredz

I would go with googler, you need to capture them to digital at the highest possible quality, and save them as a WAV, using something like Audacity, which has filters you can apply to clean the sound up and enhance it. Avoid mp3 until you have a good clean WAV to encode from. Incidentally for CD quality (16 bit sample 44,100 hz) you will use 10 Mb of space per stereo minute, so a 30 minute tape will use 300 Mb of space.

googler

First priority though is to ensure you're getting the best off the playback machine; you can't salvage (thru Audacity) what you haven't got in the first place.

esuhl

I digitised all my audio cassettes by plugging the output of the amp into my sound card and using Audacity. "Cleaning up" the sound is going to be harder - there's no foolproof way to get rid of noise without affecting the audio you want, but there are a few utilities built in to Audacity.

robredz wrote: »

Incidentally for CD quality (16 bit sample 44,100 hz) you will use 10 Mb of space per stereo minute, so a 30 minute tape will use 300 Mb of space.

That should be 10MB per stereo minute and 300MB for 30 minutes (a MB/megabyte is 8 times as big as a Mb/megabit).

googler

esuhl wrote: »

That should be 10MB per stereo minute and 300MB for 30 minutes (a MB/megabyte is 8 times as big as a Mb/megabit).

...although since these are voice tapes, the OP could probably save space by digitising them in Mono....?