Convert your favorite cassette audio tapes to your iPod – for FREE

If you have music, spoken word or other audio on cassette and want to listen to it on your iPod, it’s easy and FREE to do.

Tools:

1. Cassette Deck or Player
2. Computer
3. Audio Recording Program
4. Audio Cables

Step 1-

Open your Audio Recording program.  I’ll be using Audacity, which is a FREE audio recording program that has lots of features.  You can download it HERE. Download, install and open Audacity, and set the input to Line In or Microphone, depending on whether you plug into the back or front of your computer.

Step 2-

Plug your Tape Deck or Tape Player into y0ur computer.  Use a RCA to Headphone (Stereo Mini)  audio cable for a Tape Deck:

Or a Stereo Headphone cable for Cassetter Player:

Plug the audio cable into either the Line (blue) input on the back of your computer or if you have a Mic  (pink) input on the front, use that.

Step 3-

Press Play on your cassette deck or player, then click the round red Record button on Audacity.  Once the song or other audio has finished, press Stop (obvious right).  Go to File and Export MP3 and you’re done.

Notes:

• You may need to adjust the volume on your computer (not your speakers) for the best possible results.  Raising the volume level a few notches under distortion is usually best, just watch out for peaks in the audio.
• Audacity has lots of features to improve the sound quality of your recordings.  Save a copy of one song or recording just to play around with.
• You can use the same process to record audio from video tapes on your VCR.
• If you change the input on Audacity to “Stereo Mix” you can record audio from internet radio or any music or video you play online.

Have Fun

There are thousands of free programs available on the internet.  The list below is not a complete directory, rather it is a list of FREE programs that are highly useful and well written.  As a rule, the less programs you have installed, the better your machine will run.  However the FREE software listed, with few exceptions, are small and lightweight meaning they do not heavily weigh-down your CPU or processor.

Crap Cleaner

CCleaner or Crap Cleaner is an extremely fast hard drive cleaner.   Have you ever used UNDO?  Of course you have, most any program periodically saves temp versions of the document you’re working on so that you can go back if you mess up.  Those versions stay on your hard drive in Temp folders.  Also, any website you visit downloads images, scripts all kinds of…well, crap on your hard drive.  Use CCleaner regularly to free up hard drive space and keep things running clean.

CCleaner also has a registry cleaner and program uninstaller.  It’s a favorite amongst professional graphic artists and video editors.

Spybot Search and Destroy

Spybot SD, still one of the best anti-spyware, malware and adware programs, and still free.  Spybot’s advanced features include Immunizing your computer from known threat sites, control of your system start-up and running processes and control of your hosts file.

Ad-Aware – by Lavasoft

No one program can defeat spyware, malware or adware alone.  Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware is the perfect compliment to Spybot Search and Destroy.   What one misses the other catches.

PC Inspector – File Recovery, Smart Recovery

As mentioned in an earlier post, files are not actually deleted from your computer, they’re moved to a different location and written over.  PC Inspector’s File Recovery and Smart Recovery can recover accidentally deleted files. Has the Smart Card in your camera mistakenly been re-formatted?  If so, Smart Recovery can recover your pictures and data files. It’s an amazing FREE program.

Amp Font Viewer

Ever want a seperate graphical representation to see what your fonts look like?  Amp Font Viewer does that and more.  Fonts are fun, but can also severely slow down your system if you have too many.  With Amp Font Viewer, you can temporarily install the font for the application you’re working on, then delete it.  It’s cool.

Screenshot of AMP Font Viewer

Irfanview – Image Editor/Viewer

Ever want to “Photoshop” an image, but can’t afford Photoshop?  Irfanview is an excellent alternative.

Audacity – Audio Editor

Want to record your voice or convert your old cassette tapes to MP3’s?  Audacity is a multi-featured audio recorder and editor.  It supports multiple formats and has the ability to change speed and pitch, mix sounds together add effects and more.

Open Office Productivity Suite

If you can’t afford Microsoft Office, but want to create files that are compatible with MS Office, there is no better tool than Open Office.  Unbelievably, OpenOffice (OO) offers Word Processor (Writer) , Spreadsheet (Calc)  and Powerpoint-like (Impress) programs all for FREE.

FREE software to convert your favorite YouTube videos for your iPod.

The program I use, SUPER, can re-encode video from and to the most common and some not so common formats.  But here’s a quick way to save youtube vids to your iPod.

Use Mozilla Firefox

What sets Firefox apart from the rest are the add-ons that vastly improve your functionality.  Download and install Firefox.

The best video downloader add-on is aptly named VideoDownloadHelper – you can get it here.
You simply click on the Add to Firefox button and it’s all done. Most times with add-ons you need to restart your browser, but Firefox remembers and will re-open all your windows.

After Video DownLoadHelper is installed a new icon will be added to your tool bar:

Go to YouTube and find the video you want to convert.  Once the video starts playing the icon is activated:

Next, click on the tiny, little arrow to the right of the icon and choose the option with the .flv extension.  (.flv signifies Flash Video, the format which all YouTube videos are encoded.):

By default, Firefox saves all downloads to your desktop.  You can change that by going to Tools>Options and then browse to a different folder.  Whatever your preference.

Download SUPER

Next you’ll need to download and install SUPER, download (here). Or, if you’re like me and absolutely suspicious of any free downloads, you can Google “super” and it comes up usually the first choice.  Here’s the official link to the SUPER site. I offered a download link through flatheadenterprises.com simply because when you go through the official SUPER site, you’re led through a maze of links until you can finally download the software, and my lack of patience finds that rather annoying.   I don’t know how long it will be free, but it is now and it will re-encode any video format.

Install and open SUPER then click, drag and drop your video into the window as indicated in the image below.  Next, choose the format for your output container.  Digital video is actually a container that holds a separate video stream and audio stream.  In  the top left of the program is the Select the Output Container, choose the Apple – iPod iPhone selection.  Then simply click the encode button and SUPER will convert your video to the iPod format.

The default folder that your video will  be saved or encoded to is C:\Program Files\eRightSoft\SUPER\OutPut on windows machines.  Mac users can use Super Video Converter for Mac 1.0, for FREE encoding software.

Afterwards, open up iTunes and add your new video.

Comments are welcome and encouraged.

Note:
Right-click anywhere in SUPER for the menu to change any of the configuration options.

Have Fun!

Layers are the foundation of Adobe Photoshop.  The following video is a quick tutorial on the basics of layers.  Enjoy.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4EooYoYYTQ

Wordpress is an open source blog application which is widely used because of it’s functionality, adaptability and inherent SEO-friendly structure.  Anyone interested in blogging should seriously consider Wordpress.  The latest release is Wordpress 2.7.  For those of us upgrading from the previous release to Wordpress 2.7, the upgrade was not necessarily seamless, but then it seldom is.   Several new features were added which will greatly increase functionality, yet, as usual, some plugins and themes have caused problems or broken your blog.

This time out, I started a new blog fresh with 2.7 and upgraded two others from 2.6.  The initial installation of the fresh install got jacked because I tried to use all my old plugins.  After nearly 10 hours of trying to figure out how to resolve the issues, I deleted the entire root directory and started over.  The second installation was problem free mainly because before installing any plugins, I checked one place first.

Lesson #1:

Check the plugin compatibility page BEFORE installing plugins for any new Wordpress Release.

I was starting a new blog, but I liked my old plugins and knew how to configure them.  Some of my old plugins were redundant because the new Worpress release built them into the application.  However, I learned that some of the newer plugins worked better or had added features, ultimately requiring less to mess with, which is always better.

Fixing the upgrade

When initially upgrading from 2.6 to 2.7 everything seemed to work at first, but then my editor broke along with title tags and a few other minor annoyances.

In this case a clean install of Wordpress was out of the question.  We had hundreds of posts and dozens of subscribers.  But I ultimately not only fixed the broken blog, but improved it.

Lesson #2:

Clean your Wordpress database periodically.

Before messing with your database, make sure to back it up.

After backing up your database, export it into a comma-separated-values (csv) file or text file and look through it.  You may find some interesting entries that you had no idea were there.  Afterwards, there is a wonderful tool to find any unnecessary records that could be causing problems now or may cause unexplained issues in the future.  If you’ve tried out a number of different plugins and either they didn’t work, or you decided not to use  them, remnants still exist in your database.

I highly recommend the  Clean-Options plugin.  Clean-Options checks through your Wordpress database for orphaned options.  The “options” table in your database holds the info for your plugins.  If Clean-Options does not find an option with a “get_option” or “get_settings” referenced in any of your PHP files, it will display the record as orphaned and allow you to drop that database record.  Dropping a database record is the same as deleting.

Please be careful not to delete any shared resources.  Only delete records that directly reference a plugin that is deprecated or not in use.  I’ve used this plugin to reconfigure revisions of plugins as well.  For example, the All-in-one-SEO-pack plugin wasn’t working right, so I dropped all the all-in-one database records, reinstalled and everything was great.

Wordpress is touted as an application for those who are not particularly tech-savvy.  If you are not tech-savvy and run into issues with your blog, as you will from time to time, if can be a monstrously frustrating experience.  These are just two simple tips to help you avoid pulling out your hair if you’re a newbie.