I decided on a change of approach. I’ve gone ahead and recorded all the remaining tapes onto my hard drive (well, except one, maybe — there’s one I didn’t do that was in the pile but that I think I recorded previously, then put back in the stack because I wasn’t satisfied with how it came out).

Now to go through them all and see what needs saving.

After that, I’ve stacked up all the tapes I think I might be able to coax better sound off, now that I’m a little more experienced at it. There are a total of twenty tapes where I’m not 100% certain I’m done with them.

(The other thirty-two — yes, I’m done with them. I’ve trashed one, given away a couple, three that were unused/blank are set aside, and the rest are in a box upstairs while I try to figure out what I should do with them. Suggestions are welcome.)

I’ve gone through fifteen of the twenty; five recordings (well, ten; each tape has two sides) are still pretty much untouched. I’m pretty sure at least one of those ten sides was blank.

Right now I’m working on Side 2 of Reel No. 4, “Coffeehouse – ‘Talon’ – Dance Aug. 25, 1973.” I’m assuming Talon was the name of the band. The first forty minutes were blank, but then I hit music — though after the first five minutes or so the volume drops off drastically, so the music is almost drowned out by tape hiss.

I salvaged an eight-minute jam, cut a minute and a half of silence, and then tried to clean up a four-minute piece. It didn’t go very well.

You know what? I decided it’s not worth it. That four-minute piece isn’t anything I’ll ever want to listen to. So I’ll just skip it. Now let’s see if there’s anything more worthwhile on the rest of the tape. There’s another stretch of silence, and maybe some faint tuning up going on…and then a rather nice song, but so faint it’s not worth exporting to MP3.

I think I should maybe try this tape again with freshly-cleaned heads.