[Empeg-general] Re: Cassette tapes

[mikeb@empegbbs-noreply.merlins.org]

I recently converted about 200 minidiscs to MP3.  It was quite a lot of work, but I did discover some free software and resources that helped:  XMCD2CUE, MusiCutter, freedb and HMSCalc.

Once you have the MP3, you can get the artist and title information from www.freedb.org.  Save this text file to your hard drive.

Then, use XMCD2CUE to convert that file into a .cue sheet.

Now, open the cue sheet and large MP3 using MusiCutter.  This is an MP3 splitting utlity that doesn't resample the MP3 so it's fast and doesn't degrade quality.

MusiCutter will split the MP3 into a file for each track.  You can specify the file name format using artist, album, title and track number.  

Test the track marks using your MP3 player software, and make any adjustments.  You can repeat the MP3 splitting as many times as necessary.

HMSCalc is a small chronological calculator that I used to do the time arithmetic.  This was handy for calculating the start points of tracks for albums that didn't exist in freedb.  For instance, live recordings where I had the cue time information on the minidisc.  You may not need this.

Hope that helps.