Ubuntu – App that will rip mp3s from an analog cassette tape

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I have a few audio cassette tapes from the 1980s 🙂

The albums were never released on CD, and to prevent any more deterioration and from losing the songs forever I wanted to rip the tapes to mp3. Mp3 because this is the only format my car accepts. And I want to play them in my car and use the car's audio controls.

Is there an app that will let me do this?

Best Answer

My suggestion involves:

recording your tape as one file
Removing the tape hiss
Splitting the file individual tracks
Re-encoding the tracks into individual mp3 files

To do this will involve the following software which you can install from the Software Centre:

Audacity
Gramofile
Installing restricted codecs - search for restricted and choose the restricted extras for your variant of ubuntu
Sound Converter

Audacity

Audacity is a fantastic sound editor.

Plug in you jack into the appropriate sound-in / headphone socket in your laptop or PC sound card.
On your tape, approximately forward to where you have the "loudest sound"
Play your tape
Using Audacity, press the record button
Adjust the input levels so that the sound doesnt "clip"
Stop recording and rewind the tape
Choose from the Audacity Menu - Transport - Sound Activated Recording
Play your tape and record until the end of the tape

Now a bit of clean-up of the sound recorded.

To remove the tape-hiss choose from the Audacity Menu:

Effect - Normalize. This will adjust the approximate sound level through the entire track
Effect - Noise Removal. This will remove some of the lower frequency sounds that is the tape hiss - just follow the two suggested steps on the window. Play with the results to get the best sound on your track.

Finally, save the file as a .wav file.

Split Tracks

To break the one big .wav file into individual tracks use the Gramofile software.

Start the application and open the .wav file. Tell the application which folder to save the individual tracks.

Convert to MP3

Finally use Sound Converter

Ensure you have installed the restricted codecs for your ubuntu variant.

Run the application and select all the .wav tracks in the folder saved to by gramofile

Choose the Convert option and choose MP3

Sit back and wait for all the .wav files to be converted to MP3.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to split a mp3 file

You can split your large mp3 into small pieces by using the "split" or "split new" function in audacity, then can move apart the portion of audio that you wish to mix down into a different file in order to export it.

In the next screenshot, I have made a new Stereo Track in order to put the split audio into a different track (for visual purposes only), then I moved the second part of the audio to that track and I have selected a portion of audio which can be exported into a new file.

You don't have to split the audio in order to export the portion of audio into a different file, you can simply select the audio and choose "Export Selection" in the File Menu.

In the next screenshot I am doing as I said in the words above.

If you yet have the CD, ripping audio with a file per song can be done by using "Sound Juicer", which will allow you to choose how to rip the media from the CD. This way you will have an mp3 file per song. And the task to mix down all the songs into a large file will be easily achieved by Audacity, just in case you need to do it so.

Sound Juicer can be installed via synaptic or by diving into the website at: http://burtonini.com/blog/computers/sound-juicer

A screenshot are placed here in order to you see Sound Juicer in action. (Sorry, I don't have a CD to rip off right now, so the playlist is empty)

Ubuntu – How to use Rhythmbox to rip high-quality VBR MP3s

Just so we're talking on the same page, the pipeline used by this encoding target looks like the following on my system:

audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! lamemp3enc name=enc target=0 quality=6 ! xingmux ! id3v2mux

You can learn about each of the elements in the pipeline with the gst-inspect-0.10 tool. For example, to learn about the MP3 encoder used here, you could run:

gst-inspect-0.10 lamemp3enc

Among other things, this will tell you about the various properties supported by the element and their defaults. This tells me:

encode using variable bit rate (cbr=false from defaults)
the encoder has been set to optimise for quality rather than a target bitrate (target=0)
uses a VBR quality setting of 6 (quality=6)
uses the standard quality of the LAME engine (encoding-engine-quality=standard from defaults)

So you should already be getting VBR output from that pipeline. If you want higher quality, lower the 'quality=' number (0-10, 0 is the highest quality) and perhaps add encoding-engine-quality=high.