Last Monday 31 January 2005 19:11, Jon Morin was like: > >> Also, I've got about 4,000 cassette tapes I would > > > > like >> to digitize. I can do about 1.5 a day with it > > playing >> at regular speeds. > > > > Prioritize before you digitize! Do you really care if > > ALL 4000 make into CD/ogg/whatever? Tag your > > favorites or the rarest, or the ones that are most > > urgent, condition-wise, and go from there. > > Wow! I have a similar project going, but I thought that I had it bad > with a few hundred tapes :) Prioritizing has been key, since many > have the same tunes on them, different versions. > > It's actually a fairly involved project. My first home recording > setup was an old Fostex 4 track cassette machine and a small mixer. > Now I've got 150 multitrack cassettes laying around and no machine to > play them on. What I do is use my very high quality standard cassette > deck to play them into the computer to digitize them, flip the tape > over to get tracks 3 and 4, import them into Audacity, reverse tracks > 3 and 4 (they are backwards since the recorder recorded all 4 tracks > in one direction), cut the tracks up into individual songs, and time > shift tracks 3 and 4 to sync up to tracks 1 and 2 (to account for > small differences in the digitizing and for tape stretch). Now I have > a reasonably workable version of all of the original tracks to edit, > clean up, and remix. Most of it was recorded in my junior high school > days, so it's just more sentimental than anything, but nice to have. > Audacity has been a lifesaver for this kind of work, and I'll be > remixing them with Ardour. I don't know if I'll bother mastering them > afterwards, since it was pretty lo-fi stuff to begin with. Prioritising is definitely a good idea. I have a fair old pile of old cassette tapes that need going through at some point. Ug. Fortunately I had a moment of clarity in 2000, when I found myself in possession of the original 4-track cassette machine, mixing desk and MiniDisc recorder and dumped all my 4-track demos on to MD. This came in very handy when I decided to digitize them last year. (People who think sampling at 96kHz is a bit 'grainy' can switch off here ;-) So, the only thing I actually used Linux for was the mastering and I'm glad I did bother. Thanks to JAMin, I now have 2 CDs worth of old demos that I never thought I'd play to anyone. They still have a distinctively 'tapey' sound added to by the use of a malfunctioning copycat, now with digitized square edges, but they're perfectly listenable. Now, I really should get round to making oggs of them and put some of them up on http://musik.agnula.org I suppose. cheers tim hall http://glastonburymusic.org.uk
