CASSETTE TAPE TRANSFER

[CaptNoize]

I'm trying to transfer music from a cassette tape,to my computer. I'm using MX 21. I hooked up my cassette deck,which has a USB out on it,to the USB on my Dell Optiplex 7010. I went to the ALSA Volume Control, and clicked on input devices. I don't have a USB enable drop down...?? Do I have to enable it somewhere..? This shouldn't be that hard,since I did this a couple of years back,on a different machine, using Audacity to convert my recording to digital. I can't even get it to change the input. Any help would be appreciated.

[dai_trying]

I don't know if there is anything that can be enabled for usb recording, but have you tried connecting the line out (or headphone) socket of the cassette player going to the line in (or microphone) input on the pc?

[chris]

Does the USB adapter show up in 'lsusb'? For instance 'lsusb' shows my record deck USB connection as:
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 08bb:29c0 Texas Instruments PCM2900C Audio CODEC
What does 'arecord -l' show? Mine:
arecord -l
**** List of CAPTURE Hardware Devices ****
card 2: CODEC [USB AUDIO CODEC], device 0: USB Audio [USB Audio]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

[CaptNoize]

So,
I ended up plugging in the deck into the USB on the front. Selected the front USB from the drop down. Finally got it to work, but I really don't like Audacity. There's got to be a better program to transpose music from different mediums. It has too many parameters to adjust,and the latency of sound really sucks, no matter how much you try to adjust it.

[wove]

Latency is generally more a function of the kernel and system. General purpose Linux is not particularly good at deal with latency. There are however special low latency kernels and Distros specifically designed for AV work.

There is a custom variant of MX Linux specifically designed to for music studio work. It can be found at <http://www.bandshed.net/avlinux/> From what I gather it is put together by a developer that also runs a music studio.

Ubuntio Studio is another distro that is designed for AV work. <https://ubuntustudio.org>

A Fedora spin, Jam <https://labs.fedoraproject.org/jam/> is another distro that is specifically tailored to audio production.

[chris]

I use arecord (command line) (only does .wav, so no compression)
arecord --device=hw:2,0 -c 2 -f cd -t wav -vv -V stereo | tee "$recdir/$rec" | aplay
where $recdir and $rec are destination
aplay then plays the requisite .wav file
use flac or sox to convert .wav file to whatever.

[CaptNoize]

I had considered installing AVLinux on my newest machine,when I bought it. I don't do much AV work anymore,so that's why I just stayed with regular MX. I got one more song to digitize.I will just limp along with what I'm using now. Thanks for the suggestions, I 'll live with it for now.

[CaptNoize]

FYI...
After re- reading the AV Linux MX features, and looking at the manual again, I decided to download it, and install it on my newest machine ( which I'm actually not using, I bought it as a backup) I think it would make sense to have it on a computer here, since I'm so involved with music. I 'll let you know how the install goes, and how it works. The reviews are excellent about this particular OS.

[crosscourt]

I saw your comments and glad you were able to get it to work for you.