A few weeks ago I was looking for something and stumbled across some unmarked audio cassettes, most of them I could care less for, but one has content that I would like converted to a digital format. Anyone know how to do this or a company that can do this?
This should be a one and done type thing so I do not want to buy any equipment to perform the conversion.
Thanks Paul B
Quick Google for "USB Cassette Player" turned up what your looking for.
Edit* Oh, you don't want to buy one. Not sure where to look to get it done, or what it would cost for a professional to do it. Ask if a friend or someone local has one?
How to Transfer Cassette Tape to Computer
As long as you have a tape player you should be good to go.
Here is another step by step from CNET:
Encode Normalized MP3s
Step One Connect your cassette player's output to the line-in jack of your sound card using any combination of cables and adapters that do the job. For a standalone cassette player, we recommend using a simple cable with headphone and 1/8-inch stereo plugs on both ends. If your cassette deck is part of a stereo system, use the headphone output with the same cable mentioned above; you will probably need a big-to-small adapter to pull this off. With either system, make sure that bass, treble, and loudness levels are all set to zero.
Step Two Before commencing the process, you'll want to perform some basic tests. Set the player or receiver's volume control at about 1/3 power. Then double-click the speaker icon on your taskbar. Make sure your Line In slider is all the way up and that the Mute box is not checked.
Step Three Now, it's time to create your test file. Open MusicMatch Jukebox (currently CNET's Editors' Choice for an encoder). First go to Options, then to Recorder. Next, go to Source, and select Line In. Finally, go to Options, Recorder, then Quality, and select MP3 (128 kbps). Press Play on the cassette deck and the Record button in the top left pane of MusicMatch. Wait until the indicator at the bottom of the MusicMatch window shows around 30 seconds of audio, then press Stop on the software.
Step Four Find the test file in your MusicMatch Rips directory, which is probably on your desktop. If you can't find the audio, click the Windows Start Menu, then Find File, and search for a file called line in track 01.mp3. Double-click the file to hear it with your default MP3 player. If it's too soft, turn up your cassette player's volume knob; if it's loud and distorted, turn the volume down. Then, go back to Step Three and create another test file. Once this file sounds OK, proceed to Step Five.
Step Five This is the easy part--just do everything you did to make the test file, only continue for the duration of the cassette. Two tips on this:
In MusicMatch, Press Stop after each song and Record before the beginning of the next one (while the cassette is still running). This is the easiest way to end up with separate MP3s of each tune. Make sure you have at least 1MB of disk space for each minute on the cassette deck. Check this by double-clicking My Computer, right-clicking the C: drive, and selecting Properties from the drop-down menu.
Yep just tape deck + Line In port + male-to-male 3.5mm audio cable + Audacity (or other recording app, but Audacity's free and does pretty much everything).
Thanks guys 
For the love of all that's good & proper, do not select "save as 128 kbps mp3" as described in the above. Use Audacity to record and save an uncompressed copy in wav or flac before you start mucking around with mp3 at all. You can apply some filters to the uncompressed audio if you really want - cassettes have some weird noise frequencies that mess with the encoding, and filtering them out will net you some benefits in quality vs. filesize. I'm sure there are decent articles on this out there... I'll look around and get back to this thread when I find them.
Audacity uses the LAME encoder (which you might need to download separately?) to write mp3s, which is the best there is. Pick "variable" for bit rate and set the quality somewhere in 0-4 depending on how big you want the file (0 will be ~3 mb/min, 4 will be ~1.2.)
What kind of data are you recording? If it's music, you'll want the best conversion you can get out of it... If it's just someone speaking through a crappy mic or whatever it doesn't matter so much. Cassette quality isn't necessarily bad, but it depends a lot on the tape player, how the tape was mastered, AND the amount of actual wear on the tape. They degrade relatively quickly (well, not compared to CD-Rs but that's another story.)
+1 on audacity and +1 on saving the recording in wav or audacity format before mucking about.
I've used it to clean up pops and clicks. And any background hum can be quieted.
but half of the fun of songs on cassette is the craptastic sound quality- why would you want to "fix" that?
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