Looking to bring your old music collection kicking and screaming into the 21st Century? If you have dusty vinyl, crusty cassettes, disco-era 8-tracks, reel-to-reel tapes, or any other music media that need a digital face-lift, fear not; breathing new life into old formats is easier than ever. Here are a couple of our favorite software and hardware options:
The Soft Machine
There have always been professional tools available to harness a PC's power to fix up and convert analog music to digital, but for the most part, these programs were complicated, expensive, and outside the grasp of most users. Today, there are an increasing number of powerful, cheap, and user-friendly programs designed with the average consumer in mind.
Released this summer, Audio Cleaning Lab [$50 ] is a perfect example of how far this technology has come. All of the tools you might need for a music restoration project are combined into one package. Software "wizards" walk you through every step, from importing the audio (from a turntable or cassette deck into your computer), to cleaning it up, to re-mastering finished tracks, to final burning to a blank CD-R. Depending on your computer's processing muscle, these tasks can take awhile (potentially hours) to compute, but it's worth it to be able to do things like:
- Remove crackles and pops from vinyl
- Eliminate noise from old cassettes
- Freshen up (re-master) any audio track
At $50, the Audio Cleaning Lab is affordable and even though it doesn't offer quite as many features as similar programs by Steinberg and Sonic Foundry (makers of professional audio tools), the average user will find it sufficiently feature-rich and intuitive to use.
NOTE: Most computers come with a stereo "Audio In" jack, or at least a microphone input jack. These almost always require a 1/8" stereo jack that in turn connects to your stereo's RCA output jacks. This means you'll (likely) need a Y-cable with a 1/8" stereo jack on one end and two RCA stereo jacks on the other. Consult your computer and stereo component manuals to make sure these are the types of connections you need. The cable should be available at most electronics stores like Radio Shack.
Metal Machine Music
The external Audio CD Recorder is the newest type of component finding its way onto stereo racks. These handy machines allow you to transfer CDs (or other audio formats) to CD-Rs without the need for a computer. If you have a large collection of CDs that you want to digitize, especially if it's been well cared for over the years, then this is the way to go. The advantage of a stand-alone unit is that CDs can be created in about the time it takes to play the music. The disadvantage is that there are no on-board effects or restoration options (e.g. no scratch or hiss removal)
 We took a look at the new Philips [$500 ] CDR950 deck. Since Philips (along with Sony) was responsible for creating the CD format in the first place, I figured they'd be a good brand to evaluate. Ten minutes out of the box, I was making my first CDs -- it was that simple. An Audio CD Recorder basically works like a cassette deck: you hook all of your stereo components into it, select the audio source, adjust the recording levels, and hit the "Record" button. In a few minutes, you have a CD backup of one of your antique records or tapes. The only difference with making CD-Rs is that, when recording from analog sources (e.g. said records or tapes), you'll need to manually hit the "new track" button in-between songs. This is annoying, but again, worth the effort when you see a freshly minted copy of a treasured old favorite popping out of the CD-R drive. Most decks on the market support text entry (for labeling your albums), and many offer double-CD trays for easier copying.
NOTE: Regular CD-Rs will not work in Audio CD Recorder decks. They require a special medium called CD-R-Audio (also known as "Digital Audio CDs"). These discs are a little more expensive than CD-Rs -- since they're intended for copying music, they include copyright royalty fees.
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