Finally have all the audiocassettes – all the ones I’m going to bother with, anyway – recorded onto a PC as 16-bit, 48KHz WAV files. I have an awful lot of audiocassettes that I’m simply not bothering with. They’re mostly off-air recordings of the Dr. Demento show from 1989 to 1990… while I’m sure that I will, at some future date, come to regret not having kept archival copies of “Shaving Cream” and “My Ding-A-Ling”, for now I’m too scarred by the concept of having to edit out hundreds of Dentyne commercials.
The next project that I’m working on is, well, sort of a mix of LPs and Minidiscs. That is to say, when I was trying to archive our irreplacable vinyl records, I recorded them on to minidisc because it was easier than going directly from vinyl –> PC, and now I’m transferring them over via SPDIF. Presumably, that should avoid generational loss.
I do have one pre-recorded minidisc, which might be something of a collector’s item to the right kind of very odd collector; Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”. It’s something of a tradition of mine to – if I’m going to buy something from a weird format – make it Pink Floyd; I have “Dark Side of the Moon” on SACD, for example.
I also have a couple of concerts recorded on MD and a few J-Pop albums that I rented and copied to MD that I’ll be transferring over, but the bulk of it is LP-to-MD-and-then-to-PC stuff.
When I’m done with all of this, I get to retire a lot of hardware, both audio hardware and the PC that I’m using to do all this recording – the only thing keeping it from a 3-pass DBAN run and then being consigned to the tender care of our local computer recycling co-operative is that it has this one, final task to accomplish.
As I was saying to my wife earlier, I’ve spent most of my life doing everything I can to acquire as much technology as I can cram into my living space, and now I’m going to great lengths to get RID of some of it. It’s a crazy world. 🙂
P.S. Audacity is a fine, fine piece of software and made even more so by being free, free, free. If you hit this post by some weird search engine direction, I recommend it highly. I’d also recommend the audio hardware I’m using to do these encodes, but it’s been out of production for years, so just use whatever you can find. 🙂
