digitize my audio cassettes

i just finished processing the last of the five answering machine tapes! all the voices i want to keep have been split into small files. 813 small files! now i need to figure out the chronology of the tapes and piece the files together into one per person. looking forward having a file of all my first partner’s messages and some files to share with friends of themselves from 15+ years ago. 2 years ago

i finished the time-consuming process of picking out the messages to keep from the first of the answering machine tapes.

as an exercise in quicker gratification, i also posted the audio from another tape which contained a piece of music i wrote in college:

http://jeffcovey.net/music/recordings/1993/multiple_exposures/

when i didn’t find this in the first batch of tapes, i thought it was gone forever. i’m glad i found and preserved it! 2 years ago

i was happy to have finished editing the mp3 of the first cassette until
i started on the second and realized it was a copy of the first.

i dug out the cassettes to compare to the files, and found the company
has mislabeled them.

spent 45 minutes or so checking the beginnings and ends of each side of
the cassettes and figuring out which file matched which tape. not so
easy since a lot of the tapes were copies of each other, sometimes
45-minute sides copied onto 30-minute sides. or started somewhere in
the middle and copied to the end.

gah!

finally worked it out and confirmed all the tapes had been transferred
completely.

but found that i actually had only four unique tapes, plus three others
that were partial or whole copies of the others interspersed with
recordings of radio talk shows.

why did i do this to myself a decade ago? i must have been making
backup copies to preserve the originals, and not doing a very systematic
job of it.

so the bad news is that i’m starting over with editing, but on the good
side, i have three less hours to go through. 2 years ago

good

i gave up trying to find a way to automatically split the answering machine messages by the “beeep” and let mp3splt divide them according to silence. with a little playing with the parameters, it can do a good job of turning one huge file into a bunch of small ones to review. i’ve been going through them a little each day and saving the important ones. i’ve already grabbed nine messages from my (now deceased) first partner. it’s wonderful to hear his voice again.

more ungood

this is actually good news as well, it just means more work ahead: in the course of pursuing another goal (clean the basement), i found five more cassettes i want to preserve, including one of a piece of music from college that i thought was lost forever. i wrote the company that did the first batch of tapes to ask whether they can take these as well. 2 years ago

i got the audio files back from the digitizing company. now i just need to edit them down to the parts i actually want, and i can throw the cassettes away! 3 years ago

i shipped the cassettes to a company which will convert them to mp3s. looking forward to hearing what was on them! 3 years ago

i have a stack of cassettes of miscellaneous recordings, including some answering machine tapes with messages from my first partner. i need to send them to someone with a good tape deck and have them transferred to audio files. i’d like to have the sounds preserved, and i’m tired of carrying the tapes from place to place! 3 years ago