[Scott Dorsey]

John Williamson wrote:
Depending on how fussy she is about quality, there are portable cassette
units with a built in ADC, working over USB on both Mac and Windows
platforms. There are also one or two full size units which have better
tape handling for when the cassettes are not in prime condition.

How easy is it to set azimuth? If you have to ride it, can you? That is
really the key to getting acceptable cassette transcriptions.

Most of them have Dolby, which will save having to use a software
decoder.

It's academic since the internal Dolby decoder won't track properly anyway
because the original tape levels won't be right, because they never are.

You can use an external decoder or a machine that allows you to adjust the
decode levels for minimum pumping. It's a pain in the neck but it's a lot
better than listening to the constant whooshing in and out.

None of the software decoders are Dolby-licensed and I don't know how accurate
any of them really are, but given how bletcherous the rest of the chain is,
that may not be an issue. It's likely they are better than the hardware
decoder with fixed levels.

The ones I've seen come with Audacity, which is more than
powerful enough to record, top and tail the tracks direct to HD, and
maybe even enhance them a bit. If using the H4 or even the H2, which are
also good choices at this price level, the tracks will then have to be
imported into a DAW to tidy them up and split the cassette sides into
tracks or chapters for easier playback. Some specialist free software
and plugins for Audacity or other DAW programs can even be used to
automatically split tracks by detecting the silence in the gaps.

This is true, but it would seem a better choice just to use a good quality
USB audio interface for the job. This would also allow you to see the phase
meter on the software as you're playing back which may make riding azimuth
easier.

Of course, once you get the azimuth issues and the Dolby tracking issues
dealt with, you still have the flutter issues. But that's just the nature
of the format.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."