Old Technology Made Usable

[Micom 2000]

I have an old Sanyo Miniscribe dictaphone-type machine which was meant to allow Exectutives to vocally dictate letters to their secretaries for typing transmission to the desired recipient. It used mini-cassettes but not the Sony type used in answering machines. Unfortunately I only have 2 of these mini-cassettes and no player other than the Sanyo machine itself. It does have 2 RCA outputs, one of which is labelled earphones and the other Tel Rec.

It has a built-in speaker and mike . It has a foot-pedal as well to control play-back or record.

I've used it for years to record sometimes drunken great philosophical inspirations and then rejecting then when I listened to the tape the next day. I wish I had more than 2 of these mini-cassettes, which I would erase for my next profoundities but it has occurred to me that I could save them as sound bites on a computer. A big library of them would humble me and point out how ridiculous over the years. I'm very much on "the Trailing Edge" of computers, so how would I be able to record on a computer my many silly/profound vocalizations.

Inserted Rant { ignore it}
I've recently acquired a desktop HP dc7100 3.00 G and a Pavillion LT with over a 1ghz cpu, both of which have stratispheric memory and HD capacities to me. Accessing most I-net sites had become tedious or caused a reboot fault usually caused by Adobe Flash. I hate XP which is much like Apple Macs(the so-called user-friendly OS. :^{ ( always B-S) But the IT industry has made the internet more and more unfriendly to owners of earlier omputers.
Rant end}

I would like to hear comments about this machine and the mini-bassette disks (not Sony) and whether I could copy them to my computer via a Sound-in port with an RCA to Mini-din connjector.

Lawrence

 

[vwestlife]

With an appropriate adapter cable, you can capture audio from the tape recorder's earphone output into your computer's line level audio input (NOT the microphone input). Just make sure you either use a Y-adapter and/or make the recordings on the PC in mono, so that it will play back through both channels, rather than through only one side. (It annoys me to no end when someone copies video from a VHS tape to a digital format, and the audio is only coming through the left channel speaker because they used a mono VCR and didn't use a Y-adapter to feed its audio into both the L and R inputs!)

Also be sure to carefully set the levels of both the tape recorder and the PC's sound card mixer to keep from overloading the input and causing distortion. An earphone output isn't exactly line level, but it's pretty close if you adjust the levels correctly, so you should be able to get good results.

 

[nige the hippy]

...and regarding older computers & flash, I use firefox on my older machines with "flash block" installed (you can click on the flash to run it if you need (it's still reputedly a bit buggy though)), I also use "Avast" antivirus, I used to use AVG but I found it was getting resource hungry. I'm getting a bit fed up of all the distracting carp that takes longer to load than the rest of the stuff you actually want.

 

[TCM]

Can't say I know much about such recorders, but I agree with your "rant" on the Web. I'm on a PIII computer with Windows 95 right now, and some sites bring it to a crawl or won't work at all, while others load and function rather quickly. I refuse to upgrade my computers or Internet connection to keep doing the same things that were completely possible before. I just avoid a lot of sites. Website bloat is just like software bloat, the more speed they get, the more they waste...

 

[ajcc]

I use almost the same technique as vwestlife suggests, only that I record into actual mono (can't be done on all sound cards it seems), but a y-cable is super. On modern sound-card the line in is the baby blue connector, you can be sure of this is the other two are green (headphones/line-out) and barbie pink (mic in).
You can still buy micro-cassettes in some office supply stores and some electronics dealers (have a look in their web shops), they aren't that common and a bit expensive.

But my recordings are very noisy and the actual sound is sometimes quiet, so I'm wondering if anyone know of a recording tool for the PC with a noise filter?

 

[Raven]

I use almost the same technique as vwestlife suggests, only that I record into actual mono (can't be done on all sound cards it seems), but a y-cable is super. On modern sound-card the line in is the baby blue connector, you can be sure of this is the other two are green (headphones/line-out) and barbie pink (mic in).
You can still buy micro-cassettes in some office supply stores and some electronics dealers (have a look in their web shops), they aren't that common and a bit expensive.

But my recordings are very noisy and the actual sound is sometimes quiet, so I'm wondering if anyone know of a recording tool for the PC with a noise filter?

The line in is baby blue, the mic is pink - you're using line in, which basically means "don't amplify this signal, it's already amplified". Quite possible if your recordings come out quiet that you're using an unamplified device, in which case you should be using the microphone port.

As for recording with noise filter, I use two programs to record - GoldWave and Audacity. Goldwave definitely can do this, Audacity probably can but I haven't checked.

 

[ajcc]

The line in is baby blue, the mic is pink - you're using line in, which basically means "don't amplify this signal, it's already amplified". Quite possible if your recordings come out quiet that you're using an unamplified device, in which case you should be using the microphone port.

As for recording with noise filter, I use two programs to record - GoldWave and Audacity. Goldwave definitely can do this, Audacity probably can but I haven't checked.

My tape recorders output is very line level.
Didn't know Audacity could do advanced things, apparently it can do quite a lot. Going to try this:
http://wiki.audacityteam.org/index.php?title=Noise_Removal
And there's also a wiki page about tape transfers:
http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Transferring_tapes_and_records_to_computer_or_CD

 

[Ole Juul]

The operating system wasn't specified, so I'll assume this is for Multics. Seriously, I recommend gramofile. It uses .WAV files, will do multiple passes with various noise reduction filters, and does automatic track splitting. I couldn't get it to work under two versions although it is supposed to work with Linux. However, it works like a charm under FreeBSD.