Can somebody please help me with a CD burning question?

The basic steps are:

1. To connect your tape deck to your computer you'll need a lead with one end RCA jacks, the other 3.5mm phono. Plug the latter end into the 'line in' socket in the back of the computer. The lead will be the only thing you need to buy.

2. Next, you'll need to fiddle with your soundcard's mixer. In Windows 98 (newer Windows are probably similar, other OS are probably not), you do this by right-clicking the volume control in the bottom right of the screen, choosing 'Open volume controls', then Options-Properties, then click recording, then OK. Play something on your tape deck, and tick the select box underneath 'Line balance', and adjust the slider until you get a decent level. When you've done that, close the mixer.

3. Lastly you need software to record the signal. If you're using Nero, then you've probably already got a copy of Nero Wave Editor, which will be enough to get you started. Load that up, press play on your tape, press record on the screen, press stop on both when you're done. Save, and you should have a WAV file which will be suitable for burning to a CD.

You'll want to do other things, like splitting recording into tracks, normalising, removing noise, and you can do it quite easily with free programs.

But test out the first recording something short first. You don't have to go so far as burning it to CD, just try to record something, then play it back on your computer, and see if it sounds ok/makes a sound at all.

ps i got the lead, only $7, thanks!

I've got flac files at 24/96 bitrate, but I can convert to aiff with XLD and burn to CD with Titanium and play them on my CD player no problem.

Not that I'm complaining, but can anyone explain what's happening? I thought 24/96 were burnable/playable on DVD discs/players only, and that the files would need to be converted down to 16/44 before they could play on a CD player.

(The only time I've done this previously was about 4 years ago and the music played at half speed...)

Rip one track from the burned cd to wav/aiff and then see what it says in Audacity or some other program.

Probably the program you're using to burn to audio cds knows that the higher-res material is headed to cd and is downsampling automatically. If it's happening quickly, it's probably just truncating the data from 24 bits to 16 (basically just cutting off the last 8 bits); if it's happening really slowly, then maybe it's dithering it down to 16 bits, which would be better, if unlikely.

And if you follow the (good) advice above about ripping the cd track back into the computer, you should see a 16/44 file

Thanks svend and Michael.

Following svend's advice, Audacity says 44100Hz, 32-bit float. This must be why the files are playing. I'm still curious, though, where and how the flacs are downsampling. From what I've seen, XLD doesn't have a good reputation for downsampling. Saracon has been mentioned as a more reliable program for this. And as XLD/Toast were working at normal speed perhaps I should check Saracon out.

Thanks again for the quick and useful advice.

Interesting that you ended up at 44.1/32. The cd audio should be 44.1/16. And you started out at 24-bit. Probably got truncated to 16, then somewhere along the way it got a whole lot of extra zeros attached. Maybe the program you used to extract from the cd? If you were doing this for something more than personal use, I'd say do the downsampling (from 96 to 44.1) and dithering (from 24 to 16) in a standalone program, but since you're probably holding onto the original files and only using the cds to listen to it may not matter. I don't know Audacity, but maybe it can do the downsampling and dithering for you. And then either burn cds directly, or leave you with cd-standard files for burning.