Now for the cassettes and 45's!!!

[Gagliem]

I did both tapes and 45rpm and EP 12inches,

About tapes they were all live recordings, so the first things I had to do is converting them to a single wav file for each side of tapes (SideA.wav end SideB.wav), this is because if you havo to fix them (pitch, volume level, hiss) you would preserve the sound quality, so forget about converting them directly to mp3 or other lossy sources!!!

Another thing to do before converting the tapes, the old decks were made before cell phones or cordless, so even if the stereo cables are recent and could shield from these kind of interferences, the decks aren't, so turn off cell phones etc.. better do this in late evening if you live in a condo with thin walls ;-)

After converting in wav files, if you're comfortable with pitch and you know how the original recording was, you must first check if the pitch is correct, if not use sw like audacity, sforge etc to match the exact speed (f.i. if you know a song has a riff in C and your recording is too slow or fast (sounds in B# or C#), you have to use pitch correction to take it back to C)

Then its time for volume level and hiss reduction (I am a maniac and also I fixed tape gaps or distortions to clean up as much as possible the sound, but that's too difficult and could cause damages if you're not into it).

After that, I also split the wav file in single wave files each for avery single track the original tape had, then I store them in FLAC format, so you will preserve the original conversion in lossless format, and then you could burn it directly in am audio-cd or downsample in lossy format (mp3, wma, etc) for your portable devices.

Same thing could be applied for vinyl 45rpms, 12 inches, etc. (the only things that differs for me is that in manual fixing I also remove the clicks & pops, which are common in vinyl sources while playing it).

At this point you have a folder like this, with all the tracks, f.i if it's a live gig
[Band Name - YYYY-MM-DD Venue, City, Country [AUD or SBD]
01 - [track 1].flac
02 - [track 2].flac
03 - [track 3].flac
etc.

or if it's a studio album

[Band Name - Album title (YYYY) [original media format]
01 - [track 1].flac
02 - [track 2].flac
03 - [track 3].flac
etc.

at this point you could use OCD to scan the folder and acquire all the tracks and titles, it will be easier if you used before doing this programs like monkey's audio to tag the flac files, so OCD will directly acquire them and you're job is done.

About the scans, for vinyl it's easy as you should scan the covers and normally they will fit with few fixes the CD-case format.. about the tapes, you need to scan and and edit as best the cover to fit the cd cases (normally you have to re-design the cover)

Cheers
Gagliem