So it’s been awhile, right? Well, partly I was at Balticon in there, and dealing with various other stuff, but also I was somewhat daunted by the tape I’d pulled out of the stack to do next.

The box just says “Beatles.” Nothing else about what’s on it. There’s no insert or other list anywhere. And it’s double-length, 3600 feet, recorded at the usual 3.75″ IPS. Which means there could be nine or ten albums on here. And it wasn’t wound smoothly, so I had qualms about its condition. All in all, I was a bit reluctant to tackle it.

But I finally made a start today, and discovered that the first thing on it is the album “Something New,” from 1964, which I have never owned, so I must have borrowed a copy somewhere and taped it.

The recording is surprisingly clean, but it’s at low volume, and it’s from before there was Dolby, so I had to run the Noise Removal and Amplify effects in Audacity to get it into listenable shape.

After that was done, though, it came out pretty good.

Eventually.

I mentioned it wasn’t wound smoothly. Well, it had a twist in it, so midway through “Any Time At All” it flipped over, and the recorder was playing the back of the tape — mostly silent, with just a little bleed-through, some of which was from Side 2 and was therefore backward. I had to stop, pull out tape until I got to where it was the right way around again, then rewind it by hand so it was all going the same direction.

So I did that, but missed the beginning of “Any Time At All” when I started recording again, so I had to go back and re-record that track later, when I was finished with the other ten.

Anyway, it’s all done, and a new album has been added to my collection, and I still don’t know what’s on the rest of the tape — I didn’t play more than a few seconds past the end of “Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand.”

I’ll probably try to do more tomorrow.