If your going to go with Nero, I found the easiest method, & I tried a lot of them, was to use the Wave Editor. When you have that open, click on Audio & then Record & bingo there you go. You’ll see the Recording Console, just play the music to make sure you have the Levels set correctly. Then rewind the tape & start over. Press the red Record button on the Console & your creating a Temporary File. You can pause when you get to the end of one side of the tape, or you can keep recording & flip the tape. You can edit out bad stuff later. By the way, I don’t know if this was answered yet but, a tape deck can be hooked up directly to your computer. Now, what I did was create a folder in My Documents, titled it “Music in the raw”. This would be where you save to after you’re done with the recording. If you would like you could do all your Editing right after the Recording. I just felt it was easier to do all recording first then come back later to do the Editing. I also created a file in My Documents titled “My Albums”. This is where I put the Edited music. You open up the Wave Editor, click on open file & go to “Music in the Raw” & click on the file you want to edit & it creates a Peak File. When thats done you’ll see your wave file. To cut out the bad parts you just have to highlight the bad section & hit Ctrl>X on your keyboard & it will be gone.To highlight you just left click & drag. This was most useful to me since I recorded from LP’s. you can cut out the really bad pops & such. In the end though, what you’ll do is highlight 1 song, click on “Edit” then “Copy to File” you’ll get a “Save As” box. You’ll see where you can save as PCM Wav file. Migrate to your “My Albums” folder, create a sub-folder title it “Whatever you want”, in most cases it would be the title of the album. Open that & in the file name line write the name of the song. Hit enter. I always put a number, 01, 02 ,03,etc., before the song name so as to keep them in order. These would be the files that you would burn to a CD. No encoding necessary. If you wanted to save them to your Hdd, you could use a seperate encoder to do this.
Just a couple of things you don’t want to learn the hard way. Never click on “Save”, always click “Edit” then “copy to file”. When you highlight a song & are done copying it to a file just hit Ctrl>X & it will be cut from your wave file & out of your way. You can highlight the small gap that comes between the songs & cut that out so you have no pause at the beginning of the next song. When you get to the last song,copy it & click to exit the Wave Editor, it will ask if you want to save changes. Always click “Do not save changes”. This way you will always have your original raw file intact. You’ll have to play around with all the buttons to see what they do, but the ones I used the most were “Declicker” & “Volume change”. Mainly because of recording from LP’s. If your tapes are in good shape you won’t have to worry to much about noise reduction & all that. I know I kind of went through this quickly but you’ll just have to experiment & I think I gave you enough to get started properly. Remember your folder tree will be My Documents>My Albums>Album Title>Song Title. It will save a lot of headaches later when you go to burn them. If & when you specific questions(I know you will) feel free to ask. Almost forgot, the scroll wheel will stretch out the wave file your looking at in the Wave Editor so that you can cut out a very minute little part & make more precise edits. Have fun with it & Good Luck
