Barry Smail from Rhode Island writes:
“Thank you for your instructional videos. They are very helpful and much appreciated. Audacity is a wonderful tool but I am having difficulties when I record two sides of a cassette and want to merge them sequentially into a single MP3. I cannot seem to get the two segments to closely align so that they appear seamless. Any help would be appreciated.”
Hi, Barry. Thanks for the great question!
If I understand your question correctly, what you’re looking to do is put the entire contents of both sides of a cassette in ONE .mp3 file. I’ve got to tell you, to my way of thinking, this would make an almost unlistenably long .mp3, but I’ll show you how to join these files seamlessly.
It sounds to me like you’re already pretty adept at Audacity, so I’ll skip the basics and get right to the meat.
So the first thing that you want to do is to open your side 1 .mp3 in Audacity. Then, open your side 2 .mp3 in a separate Audacity window. Click on the beginning of the side 2 file and drag to the right until you reach the end. Don’t worry about hitting the end exactly, just make sure that you capture the entire file. Then click EDIT and COPY.
Move your cursor over to the end of your side 2 file until you see the little finger pointing at the end. Then click EDIT and PASTE. Resave the new, combined file as whatever you’d like the .mp3 to be called, and you’re all done.
Personal tip… it would be way easier to search the music off of that cassette (assuming it’s music) if you saved each individual song as .mp3’s and then just save each file into a folder with the tape’s name.
Hope that this helps!
~ Randal Schaffer
“Move your cursor over to the end of your side 2 file until you see the little finger pointing at the end. Then click EDIT and PASTE. ”
If you do this, you’ll have two copies of the side 2 file, but no side 1.
Change the paste destination to the end of the side 1 file, instead.
Thanks, Micky. Sometimes typos do sneak past writers and proofreaders. Good catch.
Randal Schaffer