The attempts at repair didn’t work. I went ahead and did what I could, but really, the quality is pretty bad for much of it. Two of the musical pieces are absolutely dreadful — not the musicians, just the recording. Wow and flutter and distortion.<\/p>\n
I’ve asked the sister who originally sent it whether she has a better copy.
\nIf not, then I’m done with the cassettes.<\/p>\n
When I cut out the silences and rattles and footsteps as speakers walked to and from the lectern (or maybe the pulpit), and the blank stretch at the end, the ninety-minute tape wound up less than an hour.<\/p>\n
I missed the memorial service; I was a thousand miles away and didn’t consider it worth the trip. Listening to this, I was right. I loved my father and I miss him, but there’s nothing in this service I needed to hear, and a few things would have annoyed me.<\/p>\n
So I went on to see if the reel-to-reel works.<\/p>\n
It mostly does. There are some issues. I needed to clean the heads, for one thing. And I’ve jiggered one of the regulator thingies that was seriously over-regulating, stopping the tape dead any time one of the reels jerked even slightly. Inserting a Q-Tip took care of it.<\/p>\n
Now to weed out all the tapes where I already have that music. First up was a tape that claimed to have four Jethro Tull albums on it: “Thick As A Brick,” “Passion Play,” “War Child,” and “Minstrel in the Gallery.” Except Side 1 actually had “Thick As A Brick,” “Passion Play,” and part of “Aqualung” — two tracks to fill up the side.<\/p>\n
I had all five albums on CD, so this tape is just going away.<\/p>\n
So that left fifty-one. Then fifty; a tape of “Tommy” backed with “Jesus Christ Superstar” and filled out with two tracks from “Live At Leeds” finished up, and I have all those already, since they were just taped off my LPs.<\/p>\n
That’s roughly 160 hours of tape left, I guess — I mostly used 1800-foot tapes recorded at 3.75 ips, which come out to just over three hours apiece, but there are also a few 2400-ft. reels mixed in, and even (I think) one 3600-footer. There may be some shorter ones, and stuff recorded at higher (or lower) speeds, as well.<\/p>\n
They aren’t all full, by any means.<\/p>\n
A lot of these were taped off my own records, because I liked being able to go 90-96 minutes without turning anything over; I remember in college I’d do my classwork with a tape running, and when I noticed it had ended, that meant it was time for a break.<\/p>\n
(Observe that I don’t say “when it ended,” I say “when I noticed<\/i> it had ended.” That could be anywhere from immediately to an hour or two later.)<\/p>\n
Fifty to go — and I need to figure out what to do with the tapes after recovering whatever’s on them that I still want. Nobody still uses reel-to-reel, do they?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The attempts at repair didn’t work. I went ahead and did what I could, but really, the quality is pretty bad for much of it. Two of the musical pieces are absolutely dreadful — not the musicians, just the recording. Wow and flutter and distortion. I’ve asked the sister who originally sent it whether she… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-generalities-rants","category-strange-days"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":855,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243\/revisions\/855"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}