audio question: cassette to digital??

I posted this in the General forum too....but maybe you guys will have more input.

I came across an box of old concert recordings.....they arent dubs of actual released material, these are personal recordings of a whole slew of RUSH shows...ranging twenty years or so.

My question is what is the best way to get these cassettes to digital format so that I may burn me some cd's, and share with all my TW buds?

It would be pretty easy. Just run headphone out of a cassette player to your input on your sound card, then use whatever you have to record.

that was what i had figured on doing, was just hoping maybe someone had come up with a way to do it better....I will end up with that "cassette hiss" though won't I?

You'll get the hiss regardless of how cleanly you record it, it's coming off cassette tape. There are lots of software solutions out there for hiss/hum/pop/crackle removal and cleanup. I'd use Waves plugins like the Restoration Bundle (http://www.waves.com/Content.aspx?id=197) or Z-Noise (http://www.waves.com/Content.aspx?id=259) within Cubase, but you'll probably want to use something easier. Try checking out Sound Forge (http://www.sonycreativesoftware. com/products/soundforgefamily.asp) or WaveLab (http://www.steinberg.net/25_1.html), they're pretty good as well. Any freeware solution you might find would probably suck, so I'd recommend pirating one of the packages I mentioned.

ok thanks for the info...i have tried to do it regular, and man, the hiss is just plain bad...will start to work on these this week....they are pretty damn good recordings and i want to preserve them. RUSH won't be playing forever....lol.