Okay now let’s do the work.

1. Clean your tape head and roller capstan with approved cleaning fluid. You can get it in almost every cassette store. This will assure you will record the best quality playback. Sometimes you need to adjust head position with tiny screwdriver also, slowly turn left and right to get the best sounded playback.

2. Connect the headphones out of your tape player into line-in of your soundcard with 1/8" TRS plug. If you can’t find it, you can mod yourself by soldering two headphone jack cables.

3. Connect stereo line out of your soundcard to headphone or stereo system for monitoring purpose.

4. Double click the speaker icon on the bottom bar of Windows screen. Go to Option > Properties > Adjust volume for Recording > tick Line In. Click OK. Turn the Line In volume all the way up.

5. Run recording software. In this tutorial I use Cakewalk Guitar Track 2.0. Click new project. Set some parameters below:

a) Go to Option > Audio > make sure playback and recording devices match your soundcard. Here I use built-in Crystal SoundFusion.

b) Set sampling rate to 44,100 Hz. Again, if you have professional soundcard, you would select 96 kHz or 192 kHz sampling rate. The higher the better.

c) Go to Advance Tab; specify the directory where the files will be stored.

d) Back to mixer board, set input source, click Lt. Cryst for track 1 and Rt. Cryst for track 2. Basically Cakewalk will record the left channel of audio input into track 1 and the right into track 2. Leave other channel to "none".

e) Set pan knobs to 100% left to channel 1 and 100% right to channel two. These ensure stereo separation between the channels. Set fader at 0 dB. Hit Record button on channel 1 and 2. This doesn’t mean Cakewalk begin to record. Only to arm the channel to be ready for recording. The screen would look like this:

6. Turn down the volume of your tape player. Set your bass treble knobs flat (optional, you might prefer slight tone control, no problemo). Play your cassette. Slowly turn up the volume. Watch the meter on Cakewalk.

Adjust the volume so the maximum bar of meter reach top of yellow region. If the peak reaches the red zone occasionally that would be fine but try to set it just in the yellow-red border. The idea is to get the loudest signal possible without clipping.

Too loud signal will distort causing unpleasant shit. Too weak signal will reduce signal-to-noise ratio, means that you need to turn the volume up during file playback to hear the sound but you also bring the noise floor up. As you play the cassette you would hear the sound comes out to your headphone or stereo system. If not, something wrong with the cabling, connectors, or level setting of your soundcard playback volume.

7. After you set the input level (also known as trimming in pro-audio world), locate the song you want to record with fast forward or rewind button. Beware don’t mess up the volume of your tape player or you will repeat the step 6 again. Now, about 5 second before the song kicks in, hit record button. Cakewalk begins to record everything comes into soundcard line-in. The idea here is to record noise figure of cassette playback system so we can eliminate the hiss/noise later. I’ll explain it later.

8. Now you finished one song. Click record button again to stop recording. Stop your tape player. On Cakewalk, click View > Edit. You’ll see 2 tracks of sound wave already printed by Cakewalk, means your cassette has been transferred into computer hard disk as digital sound waveform. Sounds easy. Are we finished? Far from that! Go on.

9. Slide location bar to initial point. Hit playback. You’ll hear the digital recorded sound now. Pay attention to audio quality. Does it sound distorted? Too weak? If you did step 6 correctly chances are you already have good record quality.

10. If you satisfied, go to Tools > Mixdown Audio > Export to Files. Your waveform now saved in WAV format file. Remember the directory where you save the WAV file.