Why didn’t anyone tell me…

I have a few, very few, audiotapes that need converting to digital so I can put the tape player/recorder and tapes in the recycle bin. I don’t really plan on doing any voice dictation any time soon, and I think there’s only one decent tape player in the house. No offense people, but its time has passed.

I guess I should point out that a couple years ago we had a big tax return – a 5 digit one. After the check cleared, I sat down in front of the collection of tapes my wife and I had been ignoring for the past 7 years of our marriage and went to the iTunes music store. If I could find the album, I put it in the cart and pitched the tape. The tapes that I knew were for me were often for a single or a pair of songs that were good, so just those songs went in the cart and the tape went in the bin. And some tapes were special – tapes of actual people sending messages back and forth to each other. These went back in the rack to be dealt with. And of course there were those radio compilations, where I had the radio on and  hit record when I liked the song. Well, the day finally came, and I bought those songs, and threw out the tape. So now I had a recycle bin full of 45 tapes or more, and around 4 tapes that needed to be kept or converted. I now return to the dailog.

So the remaining tapes are now being converted to digital on the cheap. I plugged in a walkman-like player to my work computer’s line-in, set the volume to approximately the right level, and grabbed GoldWave (demo) to do the recording. I might do these things on my mac later, but don’t have the time to spend at the mac. At work I can simply start the record and go back to work. I do this once in the morning, flip the tape after lunch, hit start again, and then I’m done with a tape. It’s not as big a project as the negatives, and it makes a lot less noise.

Goldwave has an option to record with a threshold. So if it’s too quiet, it just pauses. So for instance, when the tape stops, the recording pauses. Then when I flip the tape, it picks back up the recording. Nice! Might be fun as an “audio webcam” when you’re away from your desk. Anyway, it’s working great, can save to wav, mp3 (with free encoder download), or a million other formats I won’t use. Considering the equipment used to record and play back the tapes, mp3 is too good for it. But it’s clearly understandable, even if the audiophile crowd cringe. Goldwave itself is very unfriendly looking, but very powerful. It’s more than I need for the project probably, but it was the first app I could think of that would do what I wanted without fuss.