And while we're on the subject of transcribing things between media...

[jducoeur]

... I might as well mention my current background project: saving some of these old cassettes.

One of the major tasks in our great moving project is getting as much as possible out of this house; one of yesterday's bits was the cassettes. Which forced me to confront the question: which of these cassettes do I really, truly care about? We separated out the 20% of the cassettes that we would really mourn if something happened to them, and which I therefore really don't want to put into storage. They seem to fall into two distinct categories: music recordings that for some reason I can't obtain on CD, and period dance recordings.

Well, that being done, it occurs to me that these are exactly the cassettes that I really ought to be moving onto a more stable medium, so I'm starting to digitize them. First up: Leftovers by Clam Chowder. This is one of their earliest albums, and is a bit rougher around the edges than some, but it has a couple of their signature pieces, including "Rolling Down to Old Maui" and "Leave Her, Johnny".

Second: the tape simply marked Don Levy. I assume that there exist a few other copies of this, but I'm honestly not certain. Don is Donal Artur of the Silver Band, my sometime college roommate and fellow Fenmerian. For our first 5-10 years, he was one of the Barony's principal bards at post-revels -- his guitar was ubiquitous, and a number of us had memorized his major songs. This tape, made towards the tail end of his singing "career", contains pretty much his entire ouvre, including the original version of "Two Candles". (A little later in the project, I have The Greatest Hits of Li Kung Lo, which contains the duet version that Don and Li Kung used to do.)

Lots more yet to do: about a dozen tapes of dance music, several more Clams tapes, and obscure tapes like Crwydryn and Quartz. (Time to get "Music, Sex and Cookies" back into the lexicon again...)

Comments

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

Odds are, Don would love a copy of that tape. :-) If not Don, Sandra and the boys. :-)

[jducoeur]

I *suspect* Don kept a copy for himself. But yes, I should check...

[greatsword.livejournal.com]

If Don didn't mind, I'd love a copy of that when you get it digitized.

Give me contact information and I'll write and beg myself; I missed his music when I left Carolingia.

Ditto.

[corwyn-ap.livejournal.com]

I also would like a copy. I would be willing to compensate you and Don.

[oakleaf-mirror.livejournal.com]

Leftovers by Clam Chowder. This is one of their earliest albums, and is a bit rougher around the edges than some, but it has a couple of their signature pieces, including "Rolling Down to Old Maui" and "Leave Her, Johnny".

They have some CDs out, now. Salvaged and Spindrift (they may have been tapes before they were CDs) have most of the songs I remember from back in the day. About the only thing I can recall that they're missing is their version of Five Nights Drunk.

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

I have those CDs, and I'm pretty sure that they are both remastered selections from their earlier tape (or vinyl!) releases, and never existed as tapes in and of themselves, per se. They probably contain 3-4 tapes worth of material between them, but that means that *lots* of stuff *didn't* make it on, as they had 6 or 7 tapes worth of material in all.

Justin, I probably want copies of about half of what you're digitizing...

[hakamadare.livejournal.com]

seconded - i’d love a copy of the Don Levy tape (having heard him sing for the first time a few months ago), and the Li Kung Lo tape piques my curiosity as well. do you know if the gentlemen in question are amenable to the distribution of these recordings?

-steve

[jducoeur]

Ah, right. You guys probably haven't heard any of Don's own music yet, have you? He has a rather distinctive style, strongly guitar-focused. (That doesn't show up in his cantorial stuff, but he's a really excellent guitarist.)

No idea how Don and Richie feel about distribution; I'll have to ask them. I don't feel especially guilty about making my own copies for preservation, since I have the originals, but I'll need to check before letting them out into the wild.

Two Candles II

[dlevey.livejournal.com]

By the way, I'd be interested in the duet version of Two Candles that you have, if you manage to convert it. If you don't have the chance, I'd be happy to do it for you. I don't know how Richie feels about it, but I'm OK with (limited) distribution, as long as no-one tries to make money off it without letting me know (the trunk is copyrighted, for all the good that does) or sets it up on anonymous file-sharing like Kazaa. It's really not of much interest to those who never heard it live anyway, I suspect. What I'd really like is to get ahold of the original WBRS performance on Adam Roy's overnight show all those years ago - the night before Mayday 1985?

Re: Two Candles II

[jducoeur]

Okay, cool -- once I transfer Richie's tape, I'll see how it comes out, and we can talk with him about it.

Unfortunately, I don't seem to have a recording of the original performance. msmemory and I remember listening to it, but I don't think we taped it...

[jducoeur]

Okay -- as I move further along in the process, let's talk about that. (Indeed, one of the tapes is the Extremely Miscellaneous Tape that you made for me, many years ago...)

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

Cool! I'm not sure *I* kept a copy opf that EMT, and I've almost certainly lost some of its sources to entropy...

[jducoeur]

Well, we'll see what sort of shape it's in -- I'll admit that I haven't listened to it in a good ten years. (In general, I stopped paying attention to the cassettes a long time ago.) But I recall it as being fun strangeness...

[mermaidlady]

I've got an EMT of yours around. The case was long lost, so I'm not sure what exactly is on the Instrumental Side.

[cellio]

I have those CDs, and I'm pretty sure that they are both remastered selections from their earlier tape (or vinyl!) releases, and never existed as tapes in and of themselves, per se.

That's correct. As you said, they don't include everything -- but they do include a lot and any Clams fan should start by acquiring those two CDs. (Sounds like jducoeur has already done that.)

By the way, they've released one new CD since that, "At High Tide".

[jducoeur]

Yep, we've got all of the CDs I'm aware of. But the tape *does* have their (thoroughly drawn-out) version of Five Nights Drunk...

About those tapes of Don...

[(Anonymous)]

Friends mention things to other friends during normal conversation, of course, and word gets around... You could just ask Don himself, but in the meantime, this may help your conversion process:

http://www.the-leveys.us:6080/Music/Don_Levey/

Re: About those tapes of Don...

[jducoeur]

Ah -- howdy! I'm really not at all surprised, but the tapes were there. And of the lot, your tape was probably the one I was least certain of being able to replace, so I wanted to deal with it first. (Besides, I can *still* sing Fantasy by heart; it was a particular favorite...)

[pamelina.livejournal.com]

How are you digitizing cassette tapes?

[jducoeur]

Microsoft Digital Media Edition, Analog Recorder. This is one of those cases where Microsoft got it really right: it's a truly slick, astonishingly easy-to-use tool. Hook the cassette headphone out to the computer line in, and run the program. Has near-perfect track splitting, easy track combine/split tools for where it doesn't work, and generally requires no expertise.

It does have exactly one flaw, and it's a substantial one: it insists on recording to Microsoft's pet WMA format, rather than either native WAV or MP3. That means some lossiness. But the results are otherwise extremely good...

Audio software

[dlevey.livejournal.com]

Microsoft Digital Media Edition, Analog Recorder. This is one of those cases where Microsoft got it really right: it's a truly slick, astonishingly easy-to-use tool. Hook the cassette headphone out to the computer line in, and run the program. Has near-perfect track splitting, easy track combine/split tools for where it doesn't work, and generally requires no expertise.

It does have exactly one flaw, and it's a substantial one: it insists on recording to Microsoft's pet WMA format, rather than either native WAV or MP3. That means some lossiness. But the results are otherwise extremely good...

MP3 is going to be lossy also. For Windows, you'll probably want WAV format, on Linux probably something like FLAC or OGG (for less-lossy compression).

For audio software right now I'm using Cakewalk. This would be overkill for simple audio conversion, but as I use it for MIDI/sheet music transcription it was on the machine anyway. It too will allow you to split/move tracks, though it won't do so automatically (it's designed for audio recording, not album conversion, so you may actually *want* the blank audio space within one track).

In Linux, I've been told that there are a number of programs that will do this - Audacity, Ardour, etc. There's probably at least one which will offer processing options such as hiss/scratch removal. One of these days I'll get to that as it percolates up the stack. Once that happens, I can actually start recording a few things again, not that there's much new material in my secular world (I've done a few things for my cantorial life, but that's it). If you're really into sound work, into Linux, and even have a spare machine to play around with, check out the PlanetCCRMA project: http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software/
It's pretty much an entire Linux distribution based around sound processing and software, including low latency kernel patches, etc. And, of course, it's free (as in "beer" *and* "freedom"). Someday...

I couldn't help at all on a Mac; I'm told that stuff "just works" there, so it's nowhere near enough of a challenge. :-)

Re: Audio software

[jducoeur]

MP3 is going to be lossy also.

Sorry -- verbal shorthand. MP3 is lossy, but it's much more *useful* to me than WMA, so I don't mind direct recordings to it. Part of why I dislike the recording to WMA is that I wind up burning that back to WAV and *then* ripping it to MP3: double-lossiness, which kind of sucks.

I've used Cakewalk (albeit a *long* time ago) -- it was a reasonably powerful tool, but poorly suited for the average user. The thing about Analog Recorder is that it is designed for exactly this one task, and aside from the WMA thing does it extremely well and easily. It's the only tool I've come across that I would actually recommend to someone who doesn't really know sound. (And the automatic track splitting is a big win for me: it speeds the process up significantly, since I can do almost the whole thing unattended.)

Re: Audio software

[dlevey.livejournal.com]

Sorry -- verbal shorthand. MP3 is lossy, but it's much more *useful* to me than WMA, so I don't mind direct recordings to it. Part of why I dislike the recording to WMA is that I wind up burning that back to WAV and *then* ripping it to MP3: double-lossiness, which kind of sucks.

Ah, I understand. I'm somewhat of a Neanderthal as far as shorthand goes; I steadfastly refuse to use most of the abbreviations so prevalent in "texting", and only use Instant Messaging technology when I can't avoid it. And email is not an individual noun, dammit (I read email *messages*, not "emails")! And email is supposed to be text only! Where's my cane...?

There must be *some* option for lossless recording with the auto-split feature. I'll make a few queries for you...

I've used Cakewalk (albeit a *long* time ago) -- it was a reasonably powerful tool, but poorly suited for the average user. The thing about Analog Recorder is that it is designed for exactly this one task, and aside from the WMA thing does it extremely well and easily. It's the only tool I've come across that I would actually recommend to someone who doesn't really know sound. (And the automatic track splitting is a big win for me: it speeds the process up significantly, since I can do almost the whole thing unattended.)

I've been using Cakewalk since v3.01, about 10 years ago. It has improved *greatly* since then, and forked quite a bit. There are home studio versions, pro versions, etc. I can't tell if their Pyro 2004 will auto-split as the MS software will. It is, however, meant for the home user.

[dreda.livejournal.com]

(Time to get "Music, Sex and Cookies" back into the lexicon again...)

You mean that's not a Finnvar original? Wow - my horizons just creaked open a little farther...

[jducoeur]

AFAIK (and I can't say I'm certain), this originated with Aed of Avigdor. (As did "The Court Song", one of my SCA filk favorites.)

[mermaidlady]

the tape simply marked Don Levy.

I used to have a tape of Don performing on WBRS, my freshman (I think) year at Brandeis. The sound quality was not the best, but it was great fun. Sadly, during the various upheavals of life, it vanished.

[msmemory.livejournal.com]

Oh, that would be the one with the live laugh track furnished by alexx_kay and jducoeur!

[mermaidlady]

Yup! I could hear myself laugh at the modified lyrics to "Kodachrome".

[msmemory.livejournal.com]

I still have to concentrate to sing along with the correct Kodachrome lyrics.

WBRS Tape

[(Anonymous)]

I've still got that somewhere too. The sound quality was poor enough, however, that it wouldn't stand up well after digitisation (unless there's a lot of post-processing, which I'm not good enough to do yet).

Re: WBRS Tape

[dlevey.livejournal.com]

...To continue (yeah, I got myself an ID), I may be able to pull a few of the better-sounding songs off the tape if people are actually interested. Probably in about a week and a half or so, looking at the schedule.