I have about 200 or so cassette tapes of late 1960's and early 1970's music that I recorded back in the day. Nearly all of these recordings were from records that I owned, or those of friends, many of whom were fellow audiophiles. The usual method of operation was that we would play the record two or three times to "break it in", and then make a recording of the disc, and afterwards, put the record away, listening to the taped version to prevent wear on the vinyl. As a result, most of the tapes are of a very high caliber of quality, even after 35 years. There are also a number of radio dramas, special reports, and entertaining new items, recorded as they happened (anyone want to listen to Richard Nixon resign?)

The cassette recorder I used was a Sony TC-161SD, ferrite heads, dual loop closed capstan transport, Dolby noise reduction. As it happens, I still own this machine, and it's in excellent working order.

Of course, cassette tape storage of music is right up there along with buggy whips, lace-up corsets, and Beta video tape playback as far as convenience of use, so these tapes have been boxed up in storage for the last twenty years or so, since Compact Discs completely took over music delivery.

A couple of years ago, I dug out the tapes to listen to while doing some work on the Crown, and really enjoyed hearing the old music again, in spite of the lower reproduction quality (compared to CD's). Since I don't have a cassette deck in the Housetruck nor in any of my cars (at least none that work), the tapes went back into the storage boxes, where they sat for a while longer.

Earlier this year, I was working on the inside of the house, and wanted some music, but was feeling burned out on my CD collection, so I dug out the tapes and player again. 45 minutes of music was a long enough time for a tape to play while I put in insulation, plumbing or drywall, before I tuned the tape over or slipped a new one into the machine.

"Wouldn't it be great to be able to listen to these tapes without having to fiddle with the player, sorting tapes into their storage cases, rewinding, etc" was my thought at the time.

Now it's a week before the Solstice. Last year, I wiled away the long dark nights by making digitized copies of the maintenance manual and schematic diagrams for my electric car, scanning the documents, subjecting them to OCR (Optical Character Recognition), and editing the jumble of partly correct text that resulted.

Earlier in the Fall, I built a new computer using cast-off parts and pieces from the radio stations I work for. A Pentium 3, 700 MHz, Win 2000 Pro SP4, with a 200 Gb hard disc for music storage and a 20 Gb disc for the operating system. A professional quality audio card allows me to feed balanced audio into the computer at +4 dbm. An audio workstation program from Adobe, Audition 1.5 (formerly known as Cool Edit Pro) allows me to record the audio, edit it as necessary, and save the resulting files to the hard disc as .flac files. FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Compression. It allows the file sizes to be reduced by 45-50%, without losing any of the audio quality. A typical record album requires 200-225 Mb of disc space. (An audio CD is more like 600 Mb, uncompressed).

Here's a screenshot of the program, playing back Ten Years After's "I'd Love To Change the World":

Can't you just hear Alvin Lee finger picking that wailing feedback electric guitar?

Typically, I turn on the heat in the Crown in the late afternoon (all the equipment is set up in there, it gives me some time away from the Housetruck, cuts down on household clutter, and allows me to have an excuse to keep the mildew from settling into the bus), and fire up the computer and cassette machine. I select a few tapes to run, and usually record three or four albums worth of tapes before dinner, saving each album recording as a single audio file on the 20 Gb hard drive.

After dinner, the bus is nice and warm, and I slip out for an hour or two to edit the beginning and end of the audio file, removing excess run time. I also use Audition's Effects/Amplitude/Normalize feature to adjust the overall level of the audio in the file to maximize signal-to-noise ratio and utilize the most-significant-bit headroom of the digital recording. I also edit out particularly nasty record pops, and balance left-to right levels if they aren't to my liking.

Since I'm using the same tape machine to play back the tapes that I used to record them, the head azimuth, track width and height, head impedance, transport speed, head wrap, and all of the other variables of mechanical reproduction using tape are already optimized. I was always very careful about recording levels, and made sure that the tapes were recorded as cleanly as possible. As a result, the tapes are remarkably consistent from one to the other, and have needed little in the way of correction to be made into very passable digital recordings. Oh, yeah, they do have some background hiss, but the Dolby helps with that. For the most part, they don't seem to have lost much in the way of high frequency response, but then my ears aren't what they once were, being exposed to years of music at acoustic shock volume levels.

Once any corrections to the album as a whole are completed, I then edit the individual songs, placing cue markers at the beginning and end of each selection. Each cue marker is then labeled with the song's title. I've found Wikkipedia to be very valuable in doing this. Nearly all of the music I've worked with so far has a Wikki entry, so I go look up the album, and copy the track listing to a text file. I then copy-and-paste the individual song titles into the cue listing. I don't even have to type the song title! Clicking a "Batch" button saves each cue selection to the hard drive, naming the individual files by song title. Each album is saved in it's own folder inside a folder of the artist/band name: D:/Ten Years After/A Space In Time/<song title>.flac. Each song takes 5-20 seconds to save.

After the album is saved as individual songs, before closing the file, I open the album folder in Winamp 5.09, which supports the .flac file format. I run quickly through the album, listening to the beginning and end of each song, listening to see that the cue markers were placed in the correct location and that the intro of the next song isn't starting before the previous song's play time is over (for example). Once I'm satisfied that it's all as it should be, I close the album file, and delete it from the C:\ drive and start on the next.

Winamp version 5 has support for FLAC, and listening to the music in the finished folder is exactly like listening to the cassette tape of the album, with some important differences. For example, I can select individual songs without needing to fast forward or rewind, or skip selections that I don't want to hear. Winamp also has shuffle play, which would work on most albums, playing the tracks out of order for a fresh effect. It also will allow you to create and play "playlists", so if I got creative, I could put together sets of songs, playing "DJ" if you will (maybe next winter…)

The eventual goal is to purchase an iPod, and load most, if not all of the music onto it, allowing me to have instant access to the entire body of music for playback in the car or house. Of course, all of the .flac files will have to be converted to .mp3 files (saved as copies), but this is a fairly trivial task using the batch convert process in Audition. I've always hated the way .mp3 files sound on a high quality stereo system, the compression traumatizes the music most disturbingly, but I figure that in the noisy environment of a moving vehicle, or when the stereo is playing in another part of the house and I'm busy working, I probably won't notice. In any case, I'll still have the original .flac files, which to my ears, appear to be identical to the source material.

OK, I can hear someone out there saying "Gawd, what a lot of work, why don't you just go out and find the .mp3 files on the Internet and download them instead?" Well, for one thing, I'm at the far end of a painfully slow dial-up connection. For another, I read reports of some hapless woman who got nailed by the RIAA for $225,000.00 in a court settlement over 24 songs she downloaded from the net. No thanks, the goal here is to be able to listen to the music, not get run into the poor house.

I do still have some of the records that these tapes were recorded from (I gave away hundreds more at a garage sale in 1998), and I have about 200 records of electronic, ambient, new age, and techno that I used when I was doing a weekly electronic music program ("The New Dreamers") for the Eugene NPR affiliate. I've experimented with some direct-to-disc transfers of this vinyl, and the results are quite good. I'm using a professional quality, balanced, +4 dbm phono preamplifier, that cost more new than the Technics SL-100 MkII turntable, Stanton 681 EEE MkIIS Cartridge, and my Sony cassette deck combined.

I'll see how far this project gets before the nice weather puts a stop to it, for the time being, I have a couple of dozen cassettes done, a hundred+ yet to do, and about five more months of indoor night time entertainment to create.