[linux-audio-user] (no subject)

[tim hall]

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