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Do you have a large music collection on cassette? Have you been curios what it would take to convert your music collection on cassettes to MP3’s (a digital format that that allows you to listen to it on computer or an MP3 player like an iPod.)?

If you’re like many serious music collectors you’ve switched over long ago to CD’s or MP3’s, but still have an extensive collection of music on cassettes. Fortunately if you happen to be in the market for new cassette players, there is still quite a variety of them available and seem to be in no real danger of disappearing – at least not in the near future.

However , if you’ve ever suffered the torture of having one of your beloved cassettes “eaten” by your cassette player in the past, you’re well mindful that this isn’t all that rare of an incident , and as your cassettes continue to get older and the tape begins to degrade and harden , the danger of this happening will only increase. Also, over time and use, tapes begin to stretch creating hiss and fading.

The most obvious solution to this is to “digitalise” your cassette music collection. Not only will this preserve your valued collection, but it will do so in a format that is much more convenient to use! Consider this: A 16 MB iPod Nano (3.5” x 1.5” x ¼” and close to $160 US) holds about 4000 songs (in MP3 file format). You can buy a quality 500 MB external hard-drive for your computer for under $150. That will hold more than 300,000 songs! (MP3’s) Just exactly how monstrous is your cassette music collection anyway?

After you digitize your collection – possibly not every album but at least the favorites that you’d really hate to lose – you will soon be enjoying the satisfaction of having them handily only a few clicks away. Chances are, you’ll find yourself often enjoying those classics again rather than having them collecting dust in boxes in your attic or spare room.

Fortunately transferring your cassettes is much more simple and easy than you may imagine. Using your own boombox cassette player, free down-loadable music recording/editing software such as Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/), and a ¼ inch audio cable or similar (depending on your computer’s audio card as well as the capabilities of your cassette player) you have all you need to get rolling! Even the least technical of us will find this is something they can do .

Truly, the most arduous part of getting this done is setting aside the time to do it; fortunately you can get it up and running and walk away while your computer and tape recorder do all the work.

For the basic step-by-step details for converting your cassettes, you will find a number of very useful posts on the topic just by doing a Google search on the phrase, “How to digitize your cassettes”.

If, however, you feel you have more money than time, there are some first-class services that will do it for you. All you need to do is box up your cassettes (or records or home movies, etc.) and send them off to them and they’ll convert them into a digital medium such as MP3’s or .Wav files (in the case of audio).

One very experienced and reputable companyyou might think about for this is Reclaim Media (www.reclaimmedia.com). They’re sort of the pioneers in the industry and have quite an impressive system in place.

If you’d rather not pack up your entire cassette music collection and place it into the hands of a shipping firm and some strangers, and pay a premium for someone else to do the complete job for you, you can find some excellent tools on the market that will automatise the process for you to some degree. These are “stand alone” Cassette Digitizing Machines created for this specific purpose that don’t require you to tinker about with cables and downloading software.  They range in cost and as usual, you often get what you pay for.

One final comment : When converting your cassettes to a digital format, “.WAV” files will give you the best quality, but are also very large files and will take up more room on your hard-drive per song. MP3’s are much more compact , but will also reduce the quality to some degree . But to be honest , the difference is so minimal, that average Joe/Jane would be hard put to tell the difference in a side-by-side test.