BTBowhunter,

If I can get it to work, anybody can. The Nady 151VR-LT is a remote microphone for a video camera, but instead of plugging the mic into the transmitting part, you plug the mp3 player into it. I got the Nady 151VR-LT from www.beachaudio.com. The mp3 player is a used Rio 600 bought off of E-bay that should come with the needed USB cable for downloading the calls from your computer to it. (Hopefully there will be more color options than the pink one that I ended up with.) I had a little trouble with the Rio originally, but once I got the correct driver loaded it worked fine. The transmitting part of the Nady 151 comes with a cable that will plug into the Rio for playing the calls as output. The Speco SPC-5P Speaker already has a jack on the end of it's cable that plugs into the headphone output of the receiving part of the Nady 151. (If you plug it into the regular output port on the Nady 151 receiver it doesn't have enough amplification.) The Nady 151 receiver burns thru regular 9 volt batteries fairly quickly driving the speaker, so I built a 6 pack AA rechargable, but you could tackle that later. (This set-up isn't my idea at all, I read the info on a different board posted by LionHo & thru e-mails w/ MikeH.)

As far as free software for converting the cassettes calls to mp3s, I use a program called EAC to record the output from my cassette player into wav files on the computer. EAC can be used to modify the wav files if needed, and then to compress them into mp3s, it relies on a "sister" program LAME to do the compression. I also use this program combo to convert my LP record collection to mp3s, and set-up a hokey webpage tutorial on how to use EAC/LAME for this. The steps shown on the webpage are similar to recording the calls from a cassette.

Good luck,
Bob
Link to page that has links to EAC, LAME and files that create default settings for EAC
LP to wav/mp3 webpage (similar for cassette to wav/mp3