[mbself]

for questionable (yet usable for personal purposes) quality use your deck plus your computer's internal audio card for free

for good quality use you deck+ m-audio pci interface for about $180

for better results use your deck+RME Hammerfall card for about $550

for best results use your deck+dedicated audio workstation and hours of time in post production for whatever you would care to spend

for professional results hire a professional for whatever he charges


I do all of my transfers with my trusty Tascam US-428......good enough for me. I have used my friends project studio with high-end pre's and pre-sonus firewire interface, Pro Tools.....the works. Honestly, for cassettes quality recordings, I can hear the difference but I can't swear that i could tell which was which if I listened blind. I would know they were different and might be able to pick which sounded somewhat better, but would never be able to identify how it was captured between those two without looking.

With a competent capture on respectably decent equipment you can at least have the digital files stored away until you have time to do the post-production yourself.

Be very organized with capturing, logging and labeling each and every recording. Having a bunch of poorly/mislabeled recordings in your hard drive is as bad as having a pile of 1000 cassettes awaiting transfer. I would backup the raw transfers onto data DVD as kind of a failsafe storage archive. Make sure your workstation is comfortable....this could take a while.