Continuing the comments on copying LPs to MP3:

November 6, 2013:

Today I polished off “German Drinking Songs,” Everest/Tradition TR-2076. Don’t know the date. No idea who the singers and musicians are. It says “Recorded live in Munich,’ and nothing else about its provenance.

It’s a really crappy job of packaging — the sleeve lists two cuts that aren’t actually on the record, a bunch of the German titles are misspelled*, and there’s absolutely no useful information. No artists, no copyright, no composers, nothin’.

I tried to look it up, and discovered that Everest had a history of sleazy behavior, such as issuing unauthorized editions that they didn’t pay royalties on, so I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised.

Anyway, the album is probably from somewhere in the period 1958-1963, and it has a bunch of classic Oktoberfest music, not all of it actually drinking songs — or even songs, really, as there are a couple of instrumentals among the twenty brief numbers. There are four songs about the Rhine all in a row, followed by two about Rüdesheim; why were people in Munich singing those?

(The cuts range from 36 seconds to just over three minutes; they jammed twenty songs/pieces into a thirty-minute album. The cover says twenty-two, but it lies.)

Side Two is pretty much all Munich-related drinking songs, including a couple of classics — you may not recognize the title “In München Steht Ein Hofbräuhaus,” but you’ve almost certainly heard it; in virtually any Hollywood movie with an Oktoberfest scene, it’s the song playing in the background.

I don’t know where I got my copy. It’s in reasonably good shape — no warping or skips, but a fair bit of surface noise. The transfer went smoothly.

==

* Whoever typeset the album cover left out all the umlauts (of which
there were many), transcribed the ess-tsetts as B’s, and reversed
several vowel combinations.

November 10, 2013:

Here’s one that was hard to catalog: “Walt Disney’s Babes in Toyland,” which is not the soundtrack album. There was no soundtrack album; this is the closest approximation, but while it’s all the songs from the movie, it’s not the versions that are in the film. It doesn’t feature Annette or Tommy Sands or Ray Bolger, though it does have Ann Jillian and Ed Wynn singing their bits from the film.

It’s very confusing; why did they do it this way? Also, several sources online say the record’s from 1961 because the film was released in December of ’61, but the album very clearly says “Copyright 1964 Walt Disney Productions” on the cover.

Actually, the singers on the album are much better than the ones in the film. (Which I have on DVD, so I’m not relying on fifty-year-old memories.) And it’s a clearer recording. Some of the songs are expanded, also an improvement.

Anyway. Got a nice clean transfer, though there’s some minor surface noise in spots.

I may have mentioned here [i.e., on SFF Net, where I’d posted about watching the DVD] that it’s a pretty lousy movie, which it is, but one thing I didn’t mention because it didn’t really register until I listened to the nice clear lyrics on this version is how staggeringly, mind-bogglingly sexist some bits are. In particular, the song “Just A Toy” is simply appalling even for the time.

Other than that, though, it’s cheesy fun.

More to come…