Continuing…

November 24, 2013:

“Six Sonatas for Flute and Harpsichord,” Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach performed by Jean-Pierre Rampal and Robert Veyron-LaCroix.

Light classical; pleasant, not terribly involving. I think I’d only ever played it twice, and it’s in excellent condition; the only noise was a faint scratch at the end of the second movement of Sonata #4. Other than that it sounds as if it could have been digital to begin with.

No problems with the transfer.

I actually have a lot more by JS Bach, not sure if there’s any more by CPE Bach or any of his brothers; I’d forgotten just how big a Bach fan I was for a couple of years. Also Josquin Desprez and assorted medieval stuff.

The classical and medieval music are probably two-thirds of the remaining albums; next biggest group after that is comedy. I’m debating whether I should just get all the Bill Cosby material on CD; it’s cheap enough that way, and would be stereo, where the albums are monaural, but loses some of the sentimental value. I think I’ll see what sort of shape they’re in before deciding.

(It’s Cosby’s first four albums, all bought new pretty much as soon as they were available; my mother was a huge Cosby fan back then.)

Classical/medieval, comedy, then more children’s albums, and a couple of oddities (e.g., Environments I). Oh, and some off-Broadway material from “Hair.” No more soundtracks or pop/rock or Broadway.

I’ve pulled all the albums off the shelves, and stacked them on the floor across from the turntable; stack’s maybe five inches. I’m getting there.

November 25, 2013:

“16 Sonatas for Harpsichord,” Domenico Scarlatti, performed by Luciano Sgrizzi. I think I only played this one once; really, I don’t feel a great need to hear a lot of harpsichord sonatas as a general thing. Nice to have them available, though, and the MP3s came out really well.

December 1, 2013:

Still on my classical binge — “A Baroque Trumpet Recital” and “The Art of the Baroque Trumpet,” both late-’60s Nonesuch albums. Not much to say about them. I hit one bad skip, but amazingly was able to successfully edit it out of the recording.

More baroque still to come.

Continuing the comments on copying LPs to MP3:

November 11, 2013:

“Mel Brooks’ Greatest Hits.”

That’s not what it says on the front of the sleeve — there it says “Mel Brooks High Anxiety.” But the spine and label and so on all make it clear it’s “greatest hits.”

Side 1 is all from “High Anxiety,” but Side 2 has “Springtime for Hitler” and “Puttin’ On the Ritz” and all the other classics.

It’s in beautiful condition, and I got a flawless copy with no problem. I’m very pleased to have it!

November 13, 2013:

“Irish Songs of Rebellion,” by the Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem. This is a 1969 Everest/Tradition re-release of their 1959 album “The Rising of the Moon.”

One of the weird things about it is that as well as changing the title, they swapped the sides — Side 2 of this version was Side A back in ’59, and vice versa.

It’s a pretty good album, with Patrick Clancy’s original liner notes providing fairly detailed information on each song. The arrangements and harmonies are very simple

I’ve heard other versions of some of these songs; Peter Paul & Mary did a couple, and I admit I like the PPM versions better. Still, the Clancy versions are probably more authentic.

It’s a very clean copy; didn’t have any trouble making it.

November 18, 2013:

I just wasted far too much time tracking down credits for “Happy Birthday and Songs for Every Holiday,” a Disneyland Records collection from 1964 that’s mostly repackaged Mickey Mouse Club material. It skimps badly on crediting the songwriters and performers.

I don’t know whether this had ever been played before; it sounded brand-new. It had been opened, but still has the original shrink-wrap and is in virtually perfect condition.

No idea where I got it. At some point in the ’80s or early ’90s I apparently acquired half a dozen kids’ records that I don’t recall ever playing; I’m guessing they were either gifts or a yard sale find.

November 19, 2013:

Added to the MP3 collection: “The Baroque Lute,” by Walter Gerwin. Released by Nonesuch in 1969, three years after Gerwin died, five years after the album was recorded.

It’s not bad. Lute music doesn’t have as much tonal variety as some other instruments, but it’s still pleasant to listen to. This is three suites, one each by Bach, Buxtehude, and Pachelbel.

There’s some faint wear on Side Two, in the Pachelbel section; mostly it’s excellent condition. The software did crash once during editing, but I’ve learned to save everything to disc frequently, so I was able to pick up where I’d left off without too much trouble.

November 21, 2013:

Tonight’s prize: “Occupation: Foole,” by George Carlin.

Some very funny stuff, some dated Nixon jokes. Well worth having in my collection.

Most of it was just fine, as far as condition, but there’s a scratch/skip in “Cute Little Farts” that rendered it completely unplayable, so I bought a new copy of that one cut off Amazon for 99 cents.

More to come…

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…

Five years ago we were getting ready to move from our house in Gaithersburg to somewhere closer to my wife’s job. We had lived in the house on Solitaire Court for twenty-two years, and raised our kids there, so we had accumulated a lot of stuff — a lot of stuff. We didn’t realize how much until we had to clean the place up for potential buyers.

So we set out to declutter the place. We didn’t want to take all that stuff with us. We threw out vanloads of junk. I sorted out my books and comic books and so on, and started weeding out the stuff I didn’t want.

And I looked at the piles and piles of stuff in various obsolete (or nearly so) media, and decided something had to be done about it. I didn’t want to have LPs and cassette tapes and CDs and reel-to-reel tapes, VHS and DVDs, and so on. This is the twenty-first century, and all that stuff could be consolidated onto digital media, which would save huge amounts of space. Eliminating the multiple players would simplify matters, too.

Converting it all was far too big a job to be done before we moved. I was able to thin out hundreds of duplicates of one kind or another (books in multiple editions, LPs I also had on CD, etc.), but most of it got hauled to the new house, and I’ve been working on it ever since.

Ripping all the 500 or so CDs to disk was relatively quick and easy, though about half a dozen got screwed up and need to be re-done. (“Need” is the correct tense; I haven’t done it yet.) I disposed of a couple of our CD players (though I admit to keeping two). Then I started on the phonograph records, which required installing the appropriate software (Audacity) and hooking my stereo and turntable up to my computer.

It takes a long time to copy 450+ albums and a few dozen singles, 78s, and other oddities to MP3. I finally finished a couple of months ago. Then after moving my turntable into dead storage in the basement I hooked up my tape deck and started on the cassettes; I only have just over a hundred of those. I’m in the middle of that, with the reel-to-reel tapes still to go when the cassettes are done.

(I’ve made some progress in other media besides sound; I have one more long box of comic books left to trade in at Beyond Comics, out of the 14,000 comics I started with, and about 300 assorted books have been replaced with ebooks on my Kindle. And all the VHS tapes are gone, replaced with DVDs or Blu-Ray, even if I had to burn them to DVD myself.)

Anyway, as I’ve worked my way through all this stuff, I’ve been posting about it on my old SFF Net newsgroup. Not many people read there. Not many people read here, either, but this blog is easier to link to, and generally more permanent and more accessible, so I’ve decided to copy edited versions of some of those newsgroup posts to this blog. I didn’t keep copies of the early ones, though they’re all somewhere in the SFF Net archives; the ones I do have are all from the last few months, when I’d already finished all the ordinary pop/rock/folk music I had on LP, and had gotten to the stuff in my collection I hadn’t played in decades.

Here’s the first entry, from a post dated November 2, 2013:

National Lampoon’s “Lemmings” is now squared away on my computers in MP3 form. Condition was excellent, transfer went very smoothly.

This brought back a lot of memories; I saw “Lemmings” live at McCarter Theater in Princeton, NJ when it first toured in 1973. Back then nobody knew who John Belushi and Chevy Chase were, but after watching the show we knew they were pretty damn funny. Chase’s Hell’s Angel routine was a lot funnier live than on the album because so much of it was visual; it involved the sort of pratfall he became famous for a couple of years later on “Saturday Night Live.” (He splashed beer on the audience in the process.) And there’s no explanation on the album of what’s going on in the middle of “Lonely At the Bottom,” Belushi’s Joe Cocker parody — he fell down while singing and couldn’t get up, and the band stopped playing and walked away until he managed to get back on his feet. On the record it just sounds like a bunch of grunting and gasping.

There was a lot that didn’t make it onto the album — the entire first act, for one thing, and also “Pull the Triggers, Niggers,” because they’d already put a shorter version of that song on “Radio Dinner.”

(Some other stuff on “Radio Dinner,” such as “Deteriorata,” was also in the first act.)

Anyway. Funny stuff, and most of it has held up fairly well, though “Papa Was A Running Dog Lackey of the Bourgeoisie” is kind of dated.

More when I get around to it.