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October 4, 2006
Rip Old Tapes and Vinyl to MP3 with Spin It Again
My wife and I, as children of the 70's and 80's, still have loads of cassette tapes of bands like Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, Too Much Joy, Rainbow, Men Without Hats...the list goes on and on.
Realizing that these tapes were only degrading over time and that they'd eventually become completely unplayable (or we'd no longer have any equipment on which to play them...if not both), I started looking around for an easy way to get good-quality digital rips of these tapes.
After ripping about a dozen complete cassettes using Acoustica Spin It Again software, I give it a thumbs up. In a nutshell, Spin It Again records your tape (or vinyl or reel-to-reel...whatever you have) via the audio input on your PC to lossless WAV. It then automagically processes the WAV file into songs (this it does VERY well...I rarely have to tweak song splits). After that, you can apply any of a number of noise removal, EQ, and other audio quality enhancement filters. The final step is the most arduous: entering in all the track data manually (these aren't CDs, so using a FreeDB-like service wouldn't help much). It will then output to whatever format you like; it offers MP3, Ogg Vorbis, WAV, and WMA as defaults.
While I'd like to say the interface is perfect, it's not. A few little tweaks and extra options here and there would alleviate some minor irritations, but these are nothing that I can't live with (and it does seem to be fairly actively developed by Acoustica) (and Acoustica seems to be paying more attention to other apps right now, so I don't expect these to be fixed any time soon).
Audio quality of the output is pretty good. I'd say great, but these are old cassette tapes we're talking about as the source material, so I'd be lying if I said they sounded anything better than reasonable.
So, if you're looking for a decent (and, at $35, a relatively inexpensive) software solution for ripping old analog audio media, give Spin It Again a look. With 4 free rips in the unregistered app, and a 30-day money-back satisfaction guarantee, you really don't have any reason not to give it a try.
Posted by Craig in Home A/V
and Music & Audio