Audio cassettes-anyone?

[Camelopard]

I copied some of my wife's cassettes to cd just by using an old walkman and feeding the output into my pc. Quality isn't hi fidelity but is good enough to listen to in the car.

[555-04Q2]

Some people still play cassette tapes hock:

This is the 21st century for peets sake!

[Azumanga Davo]

My daily driver still has the original tape deck. Shame I haven't any tapes at all though.

So AM radio instead...

[edv]

I've captured and digitised plenty of vinyl and cassettes over the years.
For vinyl, you definitely need an amp or pre-amp between your turntable and your PC as DaveB points out.

Critical points:
1) a Good Turntable with a good stylus cartridge. This exercise is all about removing and filtering, so the initial capture must be as wide in fidelity as possible.
2) clean the stylus & LP before capture. Some people use a special bath...I use a wet and dry brush. Purists will tell you to get it right the first time because vinyl needs to 'rest' for several hours before being 'played' again.
3) Good software. I've been using CoolEditPro with some special plugins to reduce pops, clicks and hiss as much as possible.

It's always good to archive your raw captures, so that you can exploit better filtering software in the future or better compression techniques (ie I have been using FLAC over MP3 for several years now)

[GridGirl]

A girl at work drives a 2005 X5. She was shocked to learn it had a cassette player about a month or so ago. The informant was her 5 year old nephew. Beamer drivers.

[Dave B]

If you take the audio output from the amp it'll work fine. Headphone out to the input on the computer. The problem is that it's time-consuming to split up the tracks later.

I've never heard of this EQ correction you speak of. Perhaps it's true, but I doubt it. I used to work in recording, and I never heard of anyone mastering a record with this mystery EQ in mind. It sounds like a bit of an urban legend, because if it existed then it would be necessary to make various masters of a recording, with one specifically for this vinyl conversion. I don't think mixing engineers and producers would just send the master off to the pressing plant trusting the guys there to get it right.

In fact, it's more likely that EQ would be needed to correct problems when going from cassette to computer, especially if there's Dolby noise redution involved.

You need to do some more research then. Did you look at the link in my post, for example? Google "RIAA curve" and prepare to be mildly amazed