Many years ago I connected my stereo to my mac, downloaded an audio converter, and converted one of my tapes to mp3. Thankfully, vanity prevents me from
mentioning that the tape was Bananarama. Whooops.
The result was less than mediocre. It was scratchy and full of hissing, and that was just the singing. The sound quality was poor too. And very very quiet.
So the tapes got put back into the tape box and stuffed back under the bed. I didn't want to throw them out - there is a lot of music I love in that collection. But they didn't get played for about a decade.
Recently I thought of a band I've not heard for many years - a comedy act band from Newcastle (NSW) called the Castanet Club. I went digging around the tape box looking for it, but came up with an empty box. I googled them, but there was nothing about. Certainly no mp3's to buy on iTunes! Devastating!
But spring time (wishful thinking - it's still winter) is a time for decluttering the house, so the tapes were dragged out and rehoused in a new box when I decided I needed the plastic one for toys. I decided to look into converting them in mp3s again. This time I discovered that since I own Toast 8, I have a program that will do just what I need. It allows me to adjust the input levels for each recording session to boost up quiet tracks, and ensure that the recording is within clean parametres, it automatically splits up the recording into tracks by periods of silence, and it then lets me import to iTunes. Fantabulastic!
I had to dig through the tape box and make piles - lone cassettes, and empty boxes, tapes to record, and tapes to ensure no-one ever saw. I have a vast number of pirate recordings from my highschool years - taken straight from the radio and inexpertly cut together. You can hear DJ's being cut short between tracks, or talking over the start of a song. I used to give them imaginative names to identify them too. Picture what tracks you might find on "1983, summer hotties" !
While digging through the dusty collection, I did find the missing Castanet Club tape, so Maynard F# Crabbs is now residing in all 4 of my ipods, ready to make me dance!
It's a happy day.
I'm just not sure what I should do about the 6 tape compilation of "Miami Sound Machine" doing the hits of 1985, or the "Hooked on Classics" tape. Surely these are SO bad that they actually SHOULD be immortalised? Correct me if I am wrong? (And I so rarely am!)
The result was less than mediocre. It was scratchy and full of hissing, and that was just the singing. The sound quality was poor too. And very very quiet.
So the tapes got put back into the tape box and stuffed back under the bed. I didn't want to throw them out - there is a lot of music I love in that collection. But they didn't get played for about a decade.
Recently I thought of a band I've not heard for many years - a comedy act band from Newcastle (NSW) called the Castanet Club. I went digging around the tape box looking for it, but came up with an empty box. I googled them, but there was nothing about. Certainly no mp3's to buy on iTunes! Devastating!
But spring time (wishful thinking - it's still winter) is a time for decluttering the house, so the tapes were dragged out and rehoused in a new box when I decided I needed the plastic one for toys. I decided to look into converting them in mp3s again. This time I discovered that since I own Toast 8, I have a program that will do just what I need. It allows me to adjust the input levels for each recording session to boost up quiet tracks, and ensure that the recording is within clean parametres, it automatically splits up the recording into tracks by periods of silence, and it then lets me import to iTunes. Fantabulastic!
I had to dig through the tape box and make piles - lone cassettes, and empty boxes, tapes to record, and tapes to ensure no-one ever saw. I have a vast number of pirate recordings from my highschool years - taken straight from the radio and inexpertly cut together. You can hear DJ's being cut short between tracks, or talking over the start of a song. I used to give them imaginative names to identify them too. Picture what tracks you might find on "1983, summer hotties" !
While digging through the dusty collection, I did find the missing Castanet Club tape, so Maynard F# Crabbs is now residing in all 4 of my ipods, ready to make me dance!
It's a happy day.
I'm just not sure what I should do about the 6 tape compilation of "Miami Sound Machine" doing the hits of 1985, or the "Hooked on Classics" tape. Surely these are SO bad that they actually SHOULD be immortalised? Correct me if I am wrong? (And I so rarely am!)
