Can I record music/voice from a tape player?

Question

Is there some way I can connect a tape player to my MacBook Pro and record the contents of a cassette tape?

Answer 1

Sairy wrote:
I'll try Audacity.
There are a number of Mac audio editors out there (Sound Studio, Amadeus, TwistedWave, Wave Editor, etc). Audacity is free and quite powerful, but its interface is less polished and not very Mac-like, and some its features are rather idiosyncratic. If you haven't used an audio editor before, that shouldn't bother you -- much. Make sure to read the documentation to understand how it works.
If you use Audacity, remember that it uses its own .aup format. You should export the original recordings to AIFF or WAVE and keep them, in case you want to go back and re-edit them with other tools.
I have a basic cassette player
Remember the basic law of computing: GIGO. It really depends on how much those recordings mean to you, but, IMHO, you should record from the best player you can lay your hands on. No amount of later processing can make recordings from the output of a bad player sound like the output of a good player.
tapes we have to put on CDs
Don't expect too much. Stuff that sounds acceptable on a cassette player may sound awful on a CD player, because the CD's much higher audio quality will lay bare all the shortcomings of the original tapes. Experiment with Audacity's noise reduction filter. Check also Audacity's wiki, I think they have some instructions specifically for digitising analogue audio tapes.