My grandfather was an amateur singer and songwriter. He passed away many years ago, leaving the few old cassette tapes my mother owns the only recordings of his performances in existence.

Over the Christmas holiday, I convinced my mother to let me take these precious keepsakes and make digital copies.

I am very grateful to the author of this article at NSFTools.com that explains how to convert the tapes to MP3 format. It is well written and has exactly enough (but not too much) detail.

The writeup makes use of the freely available Audacity software to capture the audio, normalize it, remove noise, and, finally, save as individual MP3’s.

Dear NSF Tools: My mother & I thank you!