February 25, 2014:

Okay, another one squared away.

I have no idea where it came from; it’s a C-90 cassette labeled “Oldies Side 1” on one side, and “Oldies Side 2” on the other, in my handwriting, with no other explanation whatsoever.

I do not remember a thing about it, but it does in fact hold thirty-six oldies, 88:14 of music — I trimmed out a little wasted space, so it’s not the full 90 minutes. They range from 1954 to 1962, and are pretty good quality, but not perfect; the sound’s ever so slightly muddy in spots, and there are two apparent skips.

The play-list does not match any compilation I found in a quick online exploration, though a lot are on the soundtrack of “American Graffiti.”

It took awhile to identify some of these, and pin down which versions they were, but I got ’em all eventually.

Right now “Party Doll,” by Buddy Knox, is playing.

February 27, 2014:

And the next cassette in the queue was labeled “Beatles at the Beeb,” and was just that — specifically, the two-part 20th-anniversary radio show from 1982. Couple of dozen Beatles songs from their BBC appearances, interspersed with history and commentary (some from the ’60s, some new for ’82).

A lot of these songs were never released on record when the Beatles were all alive; the BBC finally put out all their Beatles material as a ten-disc series in 1994, but there’s stuff here I hadn’t heard anywhere except this show.

One thing I find amusing is that one of the announcers from 1982 sounds very much like John Cleese parodying BBC announcers; if this is the specific guy Cleese was imitating, he pretty much nailed it.

Sound quality is good, not perfect (quite aside from flaws in the originals). When I made the original tape I edited out most of the ad breaks; when I converted it to MP3 I cleaned out a couple of blips where I hadn’t hit “Pause” fast enough.

Alas, I also had to delete “Clarabella” — that was at the very end of Side 1 of the cassette and not only did it get cut off when the tape ran out, but there were fairly severe problems with the take-up reel sticking during playback. Not sure what caused that.

The interstitial material ranges from fascinating to pompous to sophomoric. The Alan Freeman stuff from “Pop Go the Beatles” is especially obnoxious.

It’s fairly clear that British Beatles fans of the ’60s had a very different experience than American ones.

February 28, 2014:

Two episodes of the radio show “The Shadow,” from the late 1930s, have been added to my collection, allowing me to relegate another cassette to the disposal box.

I had listened to these before, and remembered them — not the case with many of these cassettes. “A Friend of Darkness” was pretty good, and reasonably progressive in outlook for the time, as it makes a point that the blind can hold jobs and earn their keep; “The Isle of Fear,” on the other hand, is racist to the core, explicitly stating that the black people of Haiti are savages at heart, no matter what trappings of civilization they may acquire. It’s got a voodoo priest sacrificing white children to snake-gods at the Feast of the Blood Moon — very lurid.

The copying process went smoothly, and the digital versions don’t seem to be any less in quality than the tape was when I first received it.

I have a total of eight episodes of “The Shadow” in MP3 form now, and the next two cassettes in the stack, if they’re correctly labeled, duplicate six of those eight (including “A Friend of Darkness” and “The Isle of Fear”). I’ll probably double-check before ditching them, just to be sure.

Incidentally, I also recorded another tape, “Spine-Tingling Press Sampler,” but I haven’t decided whether I’m going to bother converting any of it to MP3. It’s samples from a few novels, and one complete short story, and the samples are kind of pointless since they’re so incomplete, while the short story just isn’t very good. Richard Sutphen’s Spine-Tingling Press appears to have only existed for two or three years in the eary 1990s.

To give you an idea how unexciting that sampler is, remember that I took the time to convert “Complete Electric Bass Course,” but I’m not planning to do these stories.

February 28, 2014:

I double-checked those Shadow episodes. The labels were correct.

As for the Spine-Tingling Press Sampler, I decided, what the hell, and converted them.

And doing so reminded me that there should be another cassette somewhere, from someone campaigning for a Stoker, and sure enough, I found it on the paperback shelves, filed under the author’s name.

So I’ve found a total of 101, trashed a damaged one that was apparently blank, and have sixty-three left to go. Several of the other thirty-seven were duplicate material, and some were blank, so I don’t know how many I’ve actually recorded.

But I think I’ll at least attempt to record all the remaining sixty-three. Thirty-nine are music; twenty-four are spoken word of one sort or another.