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Converting tapes and vinyl records to CD with Toast
Most of us have a whole load of tapes and records that contain some classic songs, but are now just gathering dust in some cupboard. The problem, of course, is that these old formats are just not all that user friendly any more. It might have been cool to take a record out of its sleeve, plonk it on the turntable and stare at the cover when you were a teenager, but these days that whole ritual seems to have lost its appeal.
However, the recent throng of pop idol and fame academy desperados clogging up our charts probably has you pining for those old classics. Wouldn't it be great if you could convert these precious albums to CD? Luckily, it's relatively easy to do this using a Mac and the CD Spin Doctor software that comes bundled with Roxio's Toast Titanium. You'll even be able to take the snap, crackle and pop out of any recordings of your old albums before you write them to CD.
In order to make recordings you need to hook up your tape or record deck to your Mac. You will have to buy a lead with a stereo 3.5mm jack on one end and two phono plugs; these are readily available from most hi-fi stores or even electronics shops such as Maplin.
Unfortunately, some Macs don't have an audio line-in socket. If you happen to have one of these machines, the answer is to invest in an external audio device such as the iMic from Griffin Technology. This costs around £40 and plugs straight into your USB port. It doesn't actually need any drivers, but it's best to plug it directly into a free USB port on your Mac rather than using a port that's shared with another device.
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Unfortunately, connecting a turntable to your Mac isn't exactly straightforward. A record deck will have a pair of phono outputs on the rear, but if you connect these directly to the line in socket on your Mac, you'll get very strange results. The sound will hardly be audible and it will be severely lacking in bass. It will also sound brittle, as it's loaded with high frequencies.
The problem is the inherent physical characteristics of vinyl make it difficult to reproduce bass frequencies. Analogue sound is stamped onto a record in the form of grooves, but low frequencies can literally pop the needle out of this groove. As a result, bass frequencies have to be attenuated before they're pressed on to vinyl. Naturally, when the record is played back these low frequencies need to be boosted back to their normal levels. This bass boosting job is carried out by a phono pre-amp.
However, a pre-amp also has another role. High frequencies are played around with during the pressing process to get better sonic performance from vinyl. In this case, the frequencies are actually boosted. Again, the pre-amp is called in to play to reduce these frequencies back to their normal level on playback. As such, a pre-amp is essential if you want to make decent-sounding recordings from vinyl.
You can buy standalone pre-amps from hi-fi shops, but if you don't want to shell out extra cash for one of these, you can just use the tape output or headphone socket from your hi-fi amp to feed the line-in socket on your Mac. However, if you decide to use the headphone socket, you'll need to set the volume level carefully so you don't overload your line-in socket, as this will lead to distorted recordings.
Disk space
Although working with audio isn't as heavy on disk space as working with video, very long audio files do take up a significant amount of storage space. For every minute of stereo-recorded audio at CD quality, you'll be using around 10MB of disk space. So for an entire album you're looking at needing anything from 500MB to 800MB of space just to hold the raw audio. [› Click Next Page below for the step-by-step guide]
