I recently had to transfer a recording from a small digital recorder to my computer. I did some research online into how to do it (though I didn't think to check here - that thread would have been handy).
Here's the process I used. It should work for a tape recorder, cell phone, or anything else with a headphone/headset jack.
You need three things. Two of them are obtainable from Radio Shack for $5-10 each. The third is free for download.
1. A wire which can plug into the headphone jack of the tape player/cell phone/recorder on one end, and has a 1/8 plug on the other. (You may need to get an adapter plug if one of them is an unusual size, but Radio Shack generally has 1/8 to 1/4 as well as 1/8 to 1/8, etc.)
2. An inline volume control wire with a 1/8 plug. It's just a wire with a little built-in volume control.
3. Recording software, such as
Audacity .
Once you have all that:
1. Plug the first wire into the headphone/headset jack of the device you're trying to record from.
2. Plug that wire into the inline volume control wire.
3. Plug the combined wire into the
Line In jack of your computer. It's generally located on the back of the computer, towards the bottom. There are usually three jacks (though some computers now combine them into two). There's the speaker/headphone jack. There's the "microphone" jack. And there's a third jack. That's the one you want. Don't use the microphone jack unless the third jack isn't there. The microphone jack is intended for a PC microphone, which works differently than Line In.
4. Turn the dial/slider on the volume control wire down to a relatively low volume. Almost, but not quite, to the bottom. This is because "Line In" is supposed to work at lower power than headphones, and without the damping, the signal could be overwhelming.
5. Open Audacity, and make sure that the input is set to "Line In." (There's a dropdown box in the upper right corner.)
6. Make sure your speakers are on, so you can do a volume check.
7. Hit the record (red circle) button on Audacity.
8. Play the thing you want to record. Tweak the volume using either the inline volume control or the volume control on the tape recorder/phone/whatever. If it's good, let it play through.
8a. If not, adjust the volume, stop the Audacity recording, get rid of what you just recorded (close the box with the waveform, and don't save it). Then hit record again and replay from the beginning.
(Audacity also makes it easy to edit. You can highlight, cut, and paste just as you would with a word processor. You can also use the "Effect" menu to do some other things, if need be. And there are downloadable add-on effects packages to do even more.)
9. When you have the full recording, export it in the format you want. Under the "File" menu, choose "Export as WAV" or "Export as MP3" (if you've installed the LAME encoder, which is also available from the Audacity page). It'll save the file for you, and you're done.
9a. You can also save the Audacity project, which includes the raw data and remembers edits you've made. It can only be opened by Audacity, and it can take up a fair chunk of disk space. It's not at all necessary if you're satisfied with the WAV or MP3 you have (for the record, Audacity has no trouble importing sound files), but might be useful if you think you might want to save again at a higher quality/bitrate or something.
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Alternatively, if you have a stereo with a "Line Out" jack, you can connect that directly to the computer's "Line In" jack with one cord (no inline volume control necessary). The recording procedure is the same, but the set-up is a little simpler.
