Copying audio cassettes to CDs and VHS video cassettes into DVDs.
 

This has to do with Multimedia, I would say :-)

a) My wife has a lot of audio cassettes for her English classes and needs to have them in CD. So I would like to copy those cassettes to CDs.

b) Besides that, I want to copy our VHS video cassettes to DVDs before they get broken or too old. That way they will last longer and will be easier to store too because of the DVD vs VHS size.

What application/s would you recommend me to use and what steps you think I should follow to accomplish this task?

Available hardware:

1. On-board audio card.
2. An old but working fine TV card (Pinnacle TV rave).
3. A digital Video recorder (Sony TRV-350).
4. VHS video player/recorder.

I will appreciate your help (as I always do my friends).

Thank you!
Glore2002.-

For the audio cassettes you can try audacity-it already has a SlackBuild script in slackbuilds.org; make sure to install its dependencies as well. You will need a cable with two male ends to conect your audio card to the cassette recorder. While recording make sure to have muted your microphone and probably everything else that you do not need to avoid noises (you can do this with alsamixer for example).

For the audio part, it is just a matter of:
- recording to WAV (bigger but lost-less),
- splitting the big record into individual tracks,
- burning in Audio CD format with whatever pleases you (eg: k3b).

For the video, that's another story, because unlike audio CDs, which contain “raw” sound — uncompressed —, video VCDs and DVDs contain compressed data (else they would contain a lot less material).

Here is the method I use. I don't say it is the best, nor the fastest, nor the friendliest one, but I think at least it is well optimized in regard to the resulting quality, given the poor quality you often start with with VCR records…

http://mandrivausers.org/index.php?s...dpost&p=440684

This link should help you convert your VHS to avi (mpeg4).
You could be interested in some background from when I did my own searches towards the same goal as you:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d-help-439321/
http://mandrivausers.org/index.php?showtopic=29129

Now, if you really want to create standard DVDs, I can help you too, but I wrote nothing online, so tell me, and I'll try and answer. Meanwhile, this could help you if you can read French; this was what helped me:
http://www.funix.org/fr/linux/main-l...edvd&page=menu

Yves.

Well, hook up the VCR to the capture card, and capture video using that. You can use ffmpeg, mencoder, transcoder, and others to capture from it. I believe that card is supported by v4l (already installed using Slackware kernel):
http://www.linuxtv.org/v4lwiki/index...nacle/PCTV_Pro

Hook up a cassette player using the headphone jack to the microphone jack on your sound card, capture using that. Audacity would be a good program, but there are many simpler programs such as ecasound.

ecasound: what I would like would be a program which when recording input from a cassette via the mic would end and start a new track at the touch of a button - does ecasound do that?

Audacity - if I remember well - requires you do one pass for each track you make - or have I got it wrong?

I use both, it depends on what you need. I don't know what you mean by 'pass'.

That I only have to listen to the recording once - I have language course cassettes which I want to transfer to the pc - hence I can read the text and at the end of each lesson I want to be able to press a button so that a new track starts.

With audactiy, again relying on memory, it was more tedious.

Anyway - which would you recommend for such a task?

oh, I see now, but I don't really know of a good solution to this

Thanks my friends for your advices and recommendations! I will try what you've suggested and will tell you what happened.

Glore2002.-

Well, what happened?