For my next tape I pulled out one labeled “Isle of Wight\/Alice Cooper\/Beatles Singles\/Salty Dog Rag\/Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy\/more.”<\/p>\n
It has issues. Half an hour into the first side, I knew that some was not recoverable.<\/p>\n
The first track from the 1970 Isle of Wight festival is Sly & the Family Stone’s medley of “Stand!” and “You Can Make It If you Try,” and I managed to get a marginally-acceptable, if somewhat fuzzy, MP3 of that, but the following two numbers by Cactus I just can’t get clean enough. For some reason they were recorded at very low volume — maybe I was trying to reduce distortion, I don’t know — and I simply can’t recover a strong enough audio signal to be worth saving.<\/p>\n
And there doesn’t seem to have ever been a digital release of this stuff, so replacing it won’t be easy.<\/p>\n
David Bromburg’s “Mr. Bojangles” (I’m hearing a lot of covers of that song lately) isn’t usable, either.<\/p>\n
Ten Years After and Procol Harum are just as bad, maybe worse. Leonard Cohen, too. And Hendrix, and Miles Davis.<\/p>\n
And on Side 2, Alice Cooper is even worse. This isn’t from the festival; it’s the album “Easy Action.”<\/p>\n
I don’t know what went wrong with this tape. On Side 2 there are moments when it almost seems as if something’s trying to slip back into alignment, but… it never happens.<\/p>\n
…and the signal finally starts to clear up some on “Beautiful Flyaway,” the eighth track on Side Two of the tape. It’s still not good<\/i>, but at least it’s recognizable as music now.<\/p>\n
Huh. After “Easy Action” is “School’s Out.” It’s not on the enclosed song list; there’s a skipped line, which I guess represents the entire album.<\/p>\n
I already have “School’s Out,” of course, so the lousy quality doesn’t matter.<\/p>\n
And then we have the Beatles — “Revolution,” and “Hey Jude” — also not on the list. Also already in my collection.<\/p>\n
The quality is still unacceptably low, so it’s a good thing it doesn’t matter.<\/p>\n
After that came “Hey Jude” and “Revolution” and a rendition of “Salty Dog Rag” I don’t recognize that might be Red Foley, and the tape concludes with Bette Midler covering the Andrews Sisters, and Simon & Garfunkel’s “59th Street Bridge Song.”<\/p>\n
Why on Earth didn’t I re-do this when I first made it? The quality here is dreadful!<\/p>\n
I tried cleaning and demagnetizing the heads, and with judicious use of Audacity’s filters managed to get the quality up to the point where I could salvage five tracks (the first four from the festival and “Salty Dog Rag”), less than half an hour out of the entire three hours plus. But that’s it.<\/p>\n
That got the stack down to thirty more tapes, three of which aren’t labeled. I’m almost done playing through the first of those; as I suspected, it’s blank. Twenty-nine to go.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For my next tape I pulled out one labeled “Isle of Wight\/Alice Cooper\/Beatles Singles\/Salty Dog Rag\/Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy\/more.” It has issues. Half an hour into the first side, I knew that some was not recoverable. The first track from the 1970 Isle of Wight festival is Sly & the Family Stone’s medley of “Stand!”… 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-303","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\/303","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=303"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":794,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303\/revisions\/794"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}