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Audio to MP3...

For many years now my wife has recorded onto cassette tape, from her hifi unit using its programming facilities, the daily radio BBC R4 plays, talks, and the Archers, and then listens to them on her walkman while doing housework, gardening, and so on.

She's gone through many walkmans - the cassette deck mechanisms eventually wear out. As an old telecoms/electronics engineer, I've enjoyed myself keeping them going until they get beyond economic repair.

So, it occurs to me why not change to an MP3 player? Possibly longer term viability and better reliability? And use SD/MMC cards to record onto and playback from.

Problem I'd like help with...

Is there a kit or design, than I can buy and/or put together or build, that will take the audio line output from the hifi unit and record onto a SD/MMC card?

Or is there a better way?

--
Roy
[Surrey, England]
Reply to
Roy Hammond
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I've done this for my fiancée using HiMD, but there's a whole raft of hassles about the implementation of this technology. Sonys half-baked copyright protection, and the woeful Sonic Stage software make what should be a simple product to use into a bit of a nightmare.

If it's just voice quality recording you're after there's plenty of small and cheap mp3 players that'll do the trick.

High quality recorders are out there, but they're kinda pricey still. They can either record full CD quality or selected mp3 bit rates. You only then have to transfer the files using your PC from the (usually large) recorders to a compact player for your wife. You might be lucky and find both a recorder and a player that use SD cards and a compatible file format, then you could just transplant the card.

niftydog

Reply to
niftydog

Thanks for your reply - lots of useful information. I'll be following it up.

Roy

Reply to
Roy Hammond

On Wed, 10 Jan 2007 11:16:32 -0000, "Roy Hammond" etched in cyberspace:

Hi Roy,

I have been converting tapes to mp3, using software on a PC with a cound card and then, wavtomp3. Its not too hard. But nowdays many radio stations allow you to down load a podcast off their web site - alreay in the right form for the mp3 player - eg

formatting link

X X X X X

Reply to
Octa Ex

it's called a PC.

real-time MP3 encoding needs about the power of a pentium 133 this is why most cheap players only record .wav...

Bye. Jasen

Reply to
jasen

Reply to
Aviator

Probably you can't do better than your computer, likely the one you typed this message on has a sound card. The way I do it (on Linux) there is a sound record program that captures the audio stream to a .wav file. As soon as that file is closed, another program runs through it and converts to mp3. It only takes a few seconds to do a 5 minute .wav file. I'm sure there are Windows utilities to do the same.

Jon

Reply to
Jon Elson

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