How to convert cassette tapes to digital yourself.

To convert a cassette to digital at home you need a USB cassette player, a computer and Audacity, which is free. Plug the player in, turn its input level down so the recording can’t clip, press Record in Audacity, then Play on the player, and let the side run. Save the result as FLAC. The tape plays in real time, so a 90-minute cassette takes 90 minutes.

Good enough for what?

This guide is for reliving old memories: hearing a voice again, a child’s first words, a relative’s interview, a mixtape recorded off the radio, with the essence of it intact, and doing it cheaply. For that job, good enough is good enough. None of these were hi-fi to begin with, and a small USB player captures what is there. The value is in the recording existing as a file you can copy and play, and tapes lose a little more every year they sit in a drawer.

It is easy to spend longer researching the perfect cassette deck than the transfer itself would take. When the aim is to listen again and share it with the family, that research buys very little.

Archival grade is another level. A transfer meant to stand as the permanent record of a tape takes a serviced hi-fi deck, the head aligned for each tape, a proper audio interface, and the money and patience those demand. This guide doesn’t pretend to be that. Near the end, one section says what the cheap route leaves out and another describes the best possible transfer. If one or two of your tapes deserve the better treatment, capture them the cheap way now so you have something to listen to, and keep the tapes so the better transfer is still possible later.

What you need

• A USB cassette player. It plays the tape and sends the sound down a USB lead. Ours is below.
• A computer with a spare USB port. Allow about 700 MB for each hour of tape while you work.
• Audacity. A free audio recorder and editor for Windows, Mac and Linux, from audacityteam.org.
• Headphones, if you want to listen while it records.

USB cassette player

ELASO USB cassette player

What we use it for: capturing audio cassettes. One USB lead carries the sound to the computer and powers the player, so there is nothing else to connect.

Connects by

USB, which also powers it

Shows up as

A USB microphone

We record at

48 kHz, 16-bit, stereo

Listening

Headphone socket on the player

Driver

None needed on our Windows 11 PC

Know before you buy: it is a basic portable player, without Dolby noise reduction or the fine adjustments a hi-fi deck has, so a good deck will get more out of a well-recorded music tape. The listing calls it a “tape to MP3 converter”; ignore that and record lossless, as below. And it needs its input level turned well down before the first recording, which is step 2.

See it on Amazon AU (paid link)

Before any tape goes in: check for mould

Hold each cassette under a bright light and look through the window at the wound tape, and at the strip of tape along the open edge. White or grey powder, fuzzy spots or fine threads are mould. Tapes kept in a garage, a shed or a damp cupboard are the usual victims.

Don’t play a mouldy tape, not even to see what’s on it. The mould rubs off onto the player’s head and rollers and from there onto every tape you play afterwards. It can also stick layers of tape together, so the tape tears as it unwinds. Put it in a sealed bag, away from the others, and clean it or have it cleaned before it goes near a machine.

Cleaning mouldy tape is a job in its own right, with its own precautions (the spores are not something to breathe in), and we don’t cover it here. The National Archives of Australia’s advice on preserving magnetic media is a sound place to start, and the PARADISEC sound archive has written up how it cleans mouldy audio tape.

Get comfortable with the cassette itself

Being willing to open a cassette is what turns a “ruined” tape into a recoverable one. Many are held together by five small screws. Others are welded shut, and the usual fix for those is to break the shell open carefully and move the two reels into a screwed shell taken from a tape you don’t need. The same trick rescues a tape whose shell is cracked or jammed, or whose little felt pressure pad has fallen off (without the pad, a tape sounds dull and unsteady).

Practise first on tapes you don’t mind damaging. A couple of op-shop cassettes are ideal. Take a photo of the inside before you move anything, so the rollers and the tape path go back the way they were.

To repair a snap:

1. Trim both broken ends square with sharp scissors, cutting away any crumpled tape.
2. Lay the two ends end to end. They should meet without overlapping and without a gap.
3. Stick a small piece of clear sticky tape (Scotch tape) across the join, on the back of the tape only. The back is the side that faces into the cassette; the outer side is the one the head reads.
4. Press it down firmly, then trim the sticky tape flush with both edges so no adhesive hangs over.

Cassette tape is under 4 mm wide, so this is fiddly, and tweezers help. You lose a moment of sound at the join. Proper splicing tape is the better material if you expect to do this more than once, but ordinary sticky tape is enough to get a tape through one capture. Treat a spliced tape as single-use: play it once, to capture it.

Step 1: Plug the player in

Connect the player to the computer with its USB lead. On our Windows 11 PC it needed no driver and appeared in the sound settings as a microphone called “USB PnP Audio Device”. Yours may be named differently; it is the microphone that appears when you plug the player in and disappears when you unplug it.

Step 2: Turn the input level down

This is the setting that matters most, and the one the instructions in the box don’t mention. A digital recording has a hard ceiling. Anything louder than the ceiling is clipped off flat, and that harsh distortion can’t be removed afterwards. Left at full level, a USB player like this will usually hit the ceiling on loud passages.

1. On Windows 11, open Settings › System › Sound. Under Input, click the cassette player.
2. Set Input volume to about 25.

On ours, 25 put the loudest moments of a tape at about −10 dB, comfortably clear of the ceiling at 0. Start there and check it in step 4. Recording a little quietly costs nothing you can hear, because the hiss of the tape itself is far louder than anything a low level adds. On a Mac the same control is in System Settings › Sound › Input.

Step 3: Set up Audacity

Open Audacity and click Audio Setup in the toolbar:

Any recorder that captures at those settings will do the job. Audacity is the one we would point anyone to.

Step 4: Check the level on the loudest part

Click the recording meter at the top of the Audacity window to start monitoring, then play the loudest stretch of the tape you can find. Watch where the meter peaks:

• Below −12 dB: fine. Quiet is safe, so don’t chase a full meter.
• Between −12 and −4 dB on the loudest moments: ideal.
• Above −3 dB, or touching 0: too hot. Lower the input volume from step 2 and check again.

Step 5: Record a side

1. Rewind the tape to the start of the side.
2. Click Record in Audacity first, then press Play on the player. Trimming a few silent seconds later is easier than missing the opening.
3. Let the side run. It records in real time, so leave the computer alone while it works.
4. When the side ends, click Stop.

Do one side per recording. Save or export it (next step), then start a new project, flip the tape and record the other side.

Step 6: Save it as FLAC

Select and delete the silence at each end if you like, then choose File › Export Audio, pick FLAC as the format and 16-bit as the depth. Name the file so you will recognise it in ten years: who or what, the year, and the side.

FLAC keeps every bit of the recording in far less space. Uncompressed, a recording like this is about 690 MB an hour; one 49-minute side of ours went from 566 MB to about 90 MB as FLAC. Loud music shrinks less than that, and half is a fair expectation. Make an MP3 only if a player accepts nothing else, and make it from the FLAC, which stays your master. Our lesson on WAV, FLAC and MP3 explains why.

To split a side into songs, click where each one starts and press Ctrl+B to add a label, then choose Multiple Files in the export window to save one file per label. Keep the whole-side FLAC as well.

Step 7: Leave the master alone, and back it up

Hiss removal, equalisation and speed correction are all tempting, and all easy to overdo. Do them on a copy. Keep one FLAC of each side exactly as it was captured, so you can start again when the tools improve or your taste changes.

Then put the files in at least two places, such as the computer and an external drive, or an external drive and cloud storage you control. Keep the tapes somewhere cool and dry as well.

What the cheap route won’t give you

• A hi-fi deck’s playback. A portable player has a simple mechanism. Its speed is less steady than a good deck’s, which you hear most on long piano or organ notes, and it may run a touch fast or slow.
• Dolby decoding. A tape recorded with Dolby noise reduction and played without it sounds brighter and hissier than intended. It is still perfectly listenable, and it can be tamed later on a copy.
• Head alignment. A tape recorded on a machine whose head sat at a slightly different angle sounds muffled on any other machine. Good decks let you adjust for that tape by tape; this player doesn’t.
• Any clean-up. What the tape holds, hiss and all, is what the file holds.
• Speed. Every tape plays in real time. Thirty cassettes is a lot of evenings.

For spoken recordings and family tapes, none of this matters much, and the tape gets captured either way. For a music collection you care about, the next section describes the other end of the scale.

What is the best possible cassette transfer?

The best possible transfer gets everything off the tape that is on it, and leaves every decision that can wait to software, where it can be redone. In order of how much each step matters:

1. A serviced, high-quality deck. Fresh belts, clean and demagnetised heads, and the speed checked against a test tape. The steadiness of the mechanism and the quality of the head set the ceiling for everything after.
2. The head aligned to each tape. Every recorder’s head sat at a slightly different angle, called azimuth. On a good deck the playback head is adjusted for each tape, and often each side, until the treble snaps into focus. On most tapes this is the biggest single improvement there is.
3. The right playback settings. The equalisation has to match the tape type (normal, or chrome and metal), and any Dolby noise reduction has to be decoded with the same type the tape was recorded with. The most careful transfers capture with Dolby switched off and decode it in software afterwards, because the decoding depends on levels being exactly right and software lets you try again.
4. A good audio interface, recording at 24-bit. A sample rate of 96 kHz is the usual archival choice. At 24-bit there is so much headroom that the level can be set safely low once and left alone.
5. An untouched master, kept for good. The capture is saved exactly as it came off the tape. Noise reduction, equalisation and editing are done on copies.

Beyond that is a specialist tier. When a tape is recorded, the machine lays down a very high-pitched bias tone along with the sound, and a trace of it stays on the tape. Restoration systems such as Plangent Processes use special wide-range playback heads to pick up that trace and use it as a timing reference, then correct in software the speed wobble that was recorded into the tape itself. That is commercial restoration work, used mostly on studio master tapes, and not something to build at home.

None of it changes what was recorded. A dictation tape played on the best deck in the world is still a dictation tape. On music that was recorded well, the difference is easy to hear.

Common questions