If you have been teaching for awhile, you probably have cassette tapes that are gathering dust. They were once useful, but now are replaced by cds. Last week I found out that I could turn these good tapes into great cds. I used my computer. It really was easy. First you need audacity download on your computer. This is free software found at http://audacity.sourceforge.net/. Next connect your tape player to your computer. This is done by using the headphone jack on the tape player and the microphone jack on the computer. You will need to use a cord with two headphone jacks on each end. I unplugged mine from my headphones. It is a cord that looks the same on both ends with a 1/4 inch jack. Import the song into audacity. Edit it if you wish and then export to itunes as a mp3. Burn your cd and presto you are done.
Audacity is a great tool for the classroom. This software will allow you to record speaking, singing or your favorite cd. Once in this software you can edit or split tracks. It is great for making podcasts and your own cd. Enjoy.
Hi Cathy, What a timely message. I am a librarian with many books and cassettes. The players are scarce and I was thinking of transferring them to cds or mp3 files. Thank you for answering my question on how to do just that.
Hi! Thank you for the directions. I teach second grade and have a lot of cassettes. Every year I have less students that have machines to play them on. My students will thank you when they get to start hearing those great stories.
[...] has a great post on using Audacity (which we use for our Lab Out Loud podcast) and another post on 180 Technology [...]