Don't throw away those old tapes! Turn them into mp3 files.

The audio tape has been one of the items set aside after the explosion of CDs and mp3 players in the world market .

If you have been teaching for more than 20 years you know what I mean: Those expensive and useful materials -so difficult to get- that helped our teaching when we wanted to enhance students' listening skills.

As time went by those tapes were left into old boxes as CD tracks played on more updated sound equipements took over. And the same was applied to mp3 files which are useful to be played on mobile devices-so common nowadays. However, no matter how modern the new material is, you still miss certain content wich was recorded on those tapes and cannot be used now simply because you tape recorder is no longer within your teaching equipment.

Well, this is what I did and my old tapes came back to "life" again:

I dug out my old walkman (but a tape deck would also be perfect for the task) and got hold of a cable to connect the walkman's headphone jack to the sound card's line-in jack on the PC -as shown on pics below :

I used Audacity to record from the walkman. Audacity is an open-source, cross-platform program that makes simple work of recording and editing audio. The edition features this application holds are limitless...and user friendly! So the tapes can actually turn into top quality audio sounds that can be played everywhere.

Do you want to learn more and recycle your old audiotapes? Further details here.

Comments

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