Importing Cassette recorded media

Doyle wrote on 3/20/2006, 2:47 PM
Vegas 4.0: I am thinking about importing some songs from Cassette tapes that were recorded by my late father in law when he was singing and playing the guitar to add to some home videos for my wife.
I have imported numerous videos from VCR tapes etc. using my Sony Handycam with it's pass through feature. My question is "If I hook up my cassette deck's audio RCA output jacks to my camcorder and do the pass through, will the audio from the cassette tape be imported into the computer (vegas) as a digital audio file that I can then put into my project?" any advice would be appreciated on if this will work and any settings for quality, noise etc. Thanks in advance.

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 3/20/2006, 3:55 PM
This should work just about identically to the VCR transfers. You will end up with a DV .avi file at 13GB/hour so make sure you've got tons of drive space available. After you've got the file captured put it on Vegas' timeline and render to a Microsoft WAV file, 16 bit, 48KHz. After that's done you can delete the captured AVI file.
PeterWright wrote on 3/20/2006, 6:26 PM
No need to do it that way.
Connect the audio out from cassette player to line in on your sound card.
Arm an audio track in Vegas to record, click the record button below timeline and start the cassette player. You will create a wav file at whatever settings you select - sounds like the 48Khz DV settings would be best for audio to go with video.
Doyle wrote on 3/22/2006, 11:48 AM
Thanks for the responses. I tried the hooking the rca plugs into my sony handycam and it worked just like you said. It came in fine as a video file. when brought into vegas i have the video and audio portion of the file (actually no video, just blue screen). I deleted the video portion leaving the audio on the audio timeline. Yes, I had about 25 gigs of the clips. if I had had a video card instead of using the sony handycam, i could have brought in the audio file as also suggested by one of our forum members. anyway, thanks guys for the help.
Steven Myers wrote on 3/22/2006, 4:22 PM
"if I had had a video card instead of using the sony handycam, i could have brought in the audio file as also suggested by one of our forum members."

Um, you don't have a sound card in your computer?
Doyle wrote on 3/23/2006, 11:35 AM
UPDATE: I imported the cassette tape into the computer using my sony handycam as my video card (being I don't have one). worked fine but as you said it made a video file of each song. with 20 songs it was 28 gigs. I found a freeware conversion program from www.GeoVid.com called Video to mp3 extractor. Dumped the video clips into it and presto it coverted them to mp3s after which I went in and deleted the video clips and all is well. A friend bought a nice little coversion box from CompUSA made by ADS called Instant Music. Wish I would have had it as you simply plug the RCA cables from your cassette, phono, etc. into it and it outputs to the computer in digital format, bingo. Oh well, live and learn, usually by the hard way. Costs around $40.
PeterWright wrote on 3/23/2006, 4:28 PM
I still don't believe your PC doesn't have a sound card. If you don't already have a lead (probably RCA to 2.5 mini jack) to connect your cassette to the sound card's line in, it would cost a lot less than $40, and you'll be recording digital audio in Vegas ....
rraud wrote on 3/23/2006, 5:11 PM
Peters correct, most consumer soundcards have the 2.5mm /1/8" stereo mini-jack for mic and line input. The in/out parameters are selected and adj. in the soundcard's controls dialog... usually by double-clicking the speaker icon or via the Settings> Control Panel menu.
Chienworks wrote on 3/23/2006, 7:20 PM
Unless, he's got a laptop with only a mic input jack.

I'm still wondering about the references to "Video card" though.

If i have critical audio digitizing to do i'll use my external A/V->DV converter instead of the line input on my sound card. My external converter has a much greater dynamic range, much less noise, and less distortion. I only use my sound card for recording junky stuff.
DelCallo wrote on 3/27/2006, 3:25 AM
What sort of converter do you have, Chien. And, how do you achieve an interface to the computer?

Just curious.

Del
Chienworks wrote on 3/27/2006, 5:12 AM
I have a SONY DVMC-DA2 converter. It has analog audio (L+R) inputs and outputs, analog composite video and S-video inputs and outputs. It also has a firewire connector. I connect the tape deck to the audio inputs and the firewire to my computer. I start capturing video with VidCap and then start playback on the tapedeck. The captured file is a DV .avi file with blank grey frames (unless i forget to disconnect the VCR's video cable, in which case i'll get the picture from whatever TV channel i had been watching the night before).
bevross wrote on 5/11/2006, 9:05 AM
Well, as someone who has done a lot more audio work than video, using a converter meant for video to get audio still seems wierd. Just get a decent audio card (& I agree the cards that come standard on pre-configured systems are horrible). Granted some folks don't want to spend the extra money, which I can understand if it's a one-off thing. It may even be possible that this Sony converter can capture audio only as .wav ? If not, I see this as a flaw in the product.
Good sound cards run the gamut, hyper-expensive to reasonable:
http://www.lynxstudio.com/lynxl22.html (sounds wonderful)
http://tascam.com/Products/US-122.html (external USB)
Chienworks wrote on 5/11/2006, 11:53 AM
Well, i use the AV converter because i had to get it for my video work, and i haven't had the chance to spend any more money on a better audio card.

The SONY converter only delivers a combined audio & video stream through firewire. There is no way to tell it to do audio only. However, there are capture programs available besides SONY's VidCap.exe that can be used, and some of them allow saving only the audio portion of the AV stream. I believe Scenealyzer can do this. On the other hand, capturing the material is a real time operation no matter what device is used. Saving the audio as a separate .WAV file afterwards and then deleting the .AVI file only takes a couple of extra minutes, so it's not much of a time waster. The only down side is making sure i've got about 14GB of free space for each hour i'm recording. With 480GB of drive space in my computer, that's not a huge problem.