When I first started recording radio stations back in 1976, I used cassettes and reel to reel tapes, never thinking far into the future of what I would do with all those tapes. Many times I would edit the music out of them, and keep just the DJ parts. This was done to save money, so I could reuse the the tapes, not thinking I was often editing out history. I made compilations called Assorted Airchecks, and boy do I regret doing that today!
What is history in radio? It's the newscasts that will often give clues to the date it was recorded, along with new music, and of course the DJ presenting it all. As I convert these tapes today that I got from other aircheck collectors, many of these tapes don't have dates, or incomplete dates. Those may have just a month and year, or a month and day. So some detective work is needed, and that's where newscasts come into play. All I need is a major news story, sports scores or concerts.
A quick internet search will often give results quite quickly. Concert dates may not always line up exactly, so guesswork is sometimes the only way to go.
I would say that 90% of the time, I properly labeled my tapes with call letters, frequency, DJ name, and a complete date. When I convert a tape now and save it, I include all of that information in the file name.
Last year, my friend Richie in Albany, NY gave me a plastic tub of cassettes, and many of them didn't have complete dates. UGH! When I was finally done converting them, I called him and admonished him for leaving out such critical information. I asked him "WHY?" and his response was, "I don't know."
What exactly is converting an audio tape to digital? Cassettes are the easiest to do because they have fixed times, with the most common being 60, 90, or 120 minutes. Then there are the oddball lengths such as 10 or 30 minute tapes.
The most troublesome tapes were the old Ampex cassettes with the brown/tan labels. Who knew at the time that 40 years later they would squeal like a greased pig? What to do? Step one was surgery, transferring the tape into a new shell, and then baking it for a couple of hours. With any luck, I could then get one good play with no squealing.
What is baking a tape? It's putting the tape into a convection toaster oven, or a food hydrator and letting the heat bond the layers of the tape back together. There's more science to it, but I'm not going to explain it here. I used to use a regular toaster oven, but that was slower and couldn't accommodate a 10" reel. So at the suggestion of a couple of friends, I bought a 5 level food hydrator. I'll set it for about 120 degrees, set a timer on my phone and walk away.
I load them in my trusty Denon dual cassette deck, set the levels in Adobe Audition, and let them fly. I'll often do one or two sets of tapes during the day, and maybe one overnight so I'll have something to work on the next day.
I have a friend who saves them as 320 mps MP3 files, but I save then at a lower bit rate, 192 mps MP3 files. I truly believe that most of us can't tell the difference with our older ears. I have other friends that save them as .wav or .flac files which are lossless files.
Having had two hard drive losses over the years, I now have 3 hard drives at home, an automated cloud back up, and a friend in Florida that I send all my digital files to. Previously, he sent me hard drive that I filled up with everything I had digitized at the time, and now send him new files as I convert them. This way I will never, ever lose anything again.
So how exactly do I do digital transfers? All my equipment goes into a Mackie mixing board, which is plugged into my computer. I have 3 dual cassette decks, a Sony DAT machine, Akai 7" reel to reel, Otari 10" reel to reel, a Sony MD and an ITC cart deck.
I use Adobe Audition 3.0 that captures the audio, and allows me to do any sort of editing needed, such as hiss reduction, equalization, and noise reduction. Remember how we used to use a razor blade, editing block and tape to edit reel tapes, and repair cassettes? AA 3.0 does the same thing, but faster and easier with digital editing.
Big Apple Airchecks offers it's services to radio folks that have tapes sitting around, and have no idea what to do with them.
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