If you’re dwelling in developing countries like Indonesia, chances are you have stacks of cassette instead of CD. Yeah cassette is cheap. It costs approximately one-third of audio CD. Tape player is much cheaper than CD player. It’s the most popular music media among us. But you know it, as the time goes, the tape quality become worse. The playback mechanism is responsible for the degradation quality as well as the environment where the cassettes are stored.

Cassettes reproduce sound by means of rolling tape into tape head driven by roller capstan. This mechanical shit will eat up the tape surface slowly. You can see the head surface became dirty by accumulated smudge from the rolling tape as you play over and over. When you play it 100 times, you won’t get as good as first time. Shitty isn’t it. You might also contribute to the damage. Place the cassette near magnetic radiation like TV will cause the information stored in the tape destroyed. Heat weather, direct sunlight, water, humidity are the enemies.

BugJet gives you a no-brainer tutorial how to save your valuable collections. By converting cassette into digital domain, your precious albums stay safe virtually unbreakable by the age with consistent quality. You don’t have to be SAE-certified engineer to record a tape. We wrote a short easy procedure as if an idiot could do it with greatest ease. Simply because we have done it and we aren’t sharp brained recording engineers at all.

Let’s do the check list what sort of tools needed to accomplish the job.

1. Your beloved cassettes (obviously, dammit)

2. A computer with soundcard. Your standard one (soundblaster type of shit) is sufficient. Here in this tutorial I use built-in soundcard, Crystal SoundFusion. No problemo. But if you’re purist with golden ear and thick wallet, go for professional soundcard with minimum 96 kHz full-duplex (able to do record and playback at the same time with mentioned sampling rate) and minimum 103 dB of dynamic range like M-Audio, ST Audio, MOTU, Echo, Aardvark, and stuff.

3. A 1/8" TRS plug head-to-head (plain English: a stereo headphone jack with the same head). This to connect your tape player’s phones output into line-in soundcard input.

4. A tape player with stereo headphones jack. Don’t force to use main speaker output to connect to your line-in input. It’s too loud chances are you’ll throw your soundcard into a garbage bin. A good sounded walkman is decent enough.

5. A headphone or stereo system to monitor what you’re recorded.

6. Recording software with mixer and level metering. You can download free software out there in cnet.download.com or harmony central. Find software that has panning knobs (to assign a channel into left or right bus), faders, and level metering (to assure your input level is hot enough yet not clipping over 0 dB). I use Cakewalk Guitar Track 2.0 in this tutorial.

7. Audio editor software. I recommend you download Audacity in audacity.sourceforge.com. It’s free open source software with great capabilities to edit audio files more than enough to support our job here. BugJet editors also covering Audacity article in here.

8. A clove cigarette (Gudang Garam Surya 12), your favorite soft drink (Wedang Kopi tjap Luwak) and fried peanuts (Dua Kelinci). This is optional for your enjoyment only (Darn! why we mentioned those brands? we don’t get paid by them!)