PC music to tape ?

[henry crun]

I have music and songs on the PC which I would like to transfer to tape cassette so I can play them in the car.

Can I just take the lead from the PC to the speakers and plug it straight into a tape recorder ?

[What_does_this_button_do?]

yes.

B

[GoneWest]

henry...you should have asked the obvious second question..."Will it work?" (not just can I plug it in!!). :D

[henry crun]

OK, I should have been more precise, thanks for the prompt.

Will it work ?

[sanjosebaz]

Yes ;)
The level is going to be way higher than a microphone though. If you have a "line in" on your recorder, use that. Otherwise, make sure you keep the record level low, to avoid distortion.

[MasterGreen]

Yes it will work, but be careful that you get the correct outputs and inputs. Otherwise, at best the quality will be poor and at worst you could damage your tape recorder.

If you have a soundblaster or equivalent soundcard then just use the output that you would normally send to your amplifying (powered) speakers. Use a T splitter if you like, so you can monitor on the speakers at the same time.

Start of with a low setting on both the MIC input gain on the tape recorder and a fairly low output on the PC volume, suck it and see.

Getting the recortding levels correct is a real trial and error thing and it does depend a lot on your recorder. As a rule use gain on the PC rather than the recorder to up the level. Also use manual gains rather than the automatic gain control that many newer recorders have.

Lastly use a good quality lead and put the recorder as far as practical from the PC. Do not have loops in the wire. This avoids lots of stray noise.

Have fun..

[henry crun]

Sanjosebaz and Master Green.
Thanks for your help, my efforts so far are not perfect but I'm getting there.

Main problem now is stray noise which is probably because the lead from pc to tape is short and home made. I have another longer professionally made job on order and hopefully that will cure it.

[sanjosebaz]

Some (most?) of the stray noise may be coming from your sound card though. The inside of a PC is a noisy environment - high speed Pentium chipsets are like radio transmitters!

You can (with care!) shield your sound card by surrounding it with kitchen foil:
1)The foil must be insulated from the card (and adjacent cards), obviously - otherwise you'll have interesting smoke patterns emerging from your PC
2)You need to ground the foil to the PC case (the metal, internal case)

The above procedure has its risks, but helps. Noise also depends on the quality of the sound card - some have better filtering than others. Shielding a poor card will not help very much, unfortunately.