Recently I got a wild hair to hear the track "Beyond Babylon" by the 80's hair metal band Rock City Angels. Why is not important, but before you go casting stones about the shittiness of hair-metal (the words butt-rock will not be tolerated on this blog, 'k?) I'm sure we can all agree that in the late 80's when the cassette was king and we all had craploads of tapes, and the shiny new compact disc that was looming over the horizon seemed like an exiting new option and everything, but there was no WAY we were gonna replace all of those tapes with CDs. If you're like me, you still have a box or a suitcase (or both) full of tapes somewhere. I even have a glovebox full of awesome mix-tapes in my van that spill out periodically, even though the tape-deck hasn't worked in 4 years. Man, those tapes are awesome.
There are albums that I have bought 3 or 4 times in my life already, first on vinyl, then the tape, then the disc, and most recently the mp3. what a shitty deal, since I can't ever really own a song after all that. The platform continues to change, and it's current incarnation (mp3) is all encoded and shit, so you don't really have access to the tracks like you do with a CD. I haven't owned a functional CD player in years either, but I have hundreds of those shiny chunks of plastic garbage crammed into my crannies. You do too.
What do you do with these things that were once loved, and now have been replaced? You fuckin' pack that shit away for a rainy day or something! Well look outside now, it's raining buckets and you can't buy the Rock City Angels first album (Young Man's Blues) online anywhere because it's been out of print since the year it was released (1988), and the LP is going for $45 on Amazon - no thank you. Time to figure out how to digitize cassettes since I'm just sitting around indoors getting stoned anyway.
It's actually really easy to do if you have a Mac. Just make sure you have a tape-deck that works, and this is harder than you expect. I think the clock ran out on tape-decks sometime about 3 months ago, because the one you have in the basement or at your mom's house has most likely shit the bed already and you just won't know this until it's pissing rain and you have a hard-on to start digitizing tapes whilst smoking bongs. My advice is to have a sacrificial cassette at the ready to stick into that old deck before you proceed with anything else, (maybe not the bong, you can go ahead and smoke the bong). My girlfriend had a Paula Abdul tape for some reason (?!?), so that's what I used. Who on Earth would care if a Paula Abdul tape gets munched by a decrepit old piece of obsolete technology? not me, and you sure don't want to put the tape you care about into a dinosaur's mouth, right?
I had to repeat this exercise with 3 different tape decks by the way, and I amassed a pile of "e-waste" in the process (that's electronic-waste kids, you can't put this dead shit into the landfill anymore, now we ship it overseas for slave-labor-people to pick apart and sell it back to us. it's awesome). It was a boombox that finally came though for me, and the fucker still plays CD's too. this particular boombox probably dates from the early 2000's because it's shaped like a piece of space-age dogshit, all silver and futuristic molded-plastic with lights that don't mean anything on it, but it works. (you can also still buy a cassette deck at Radio Shack for about $40 that's a total piece of garbage that you will hate, but in a pinch, you do what you gotta do I guess. I was ready to kill & die by the time the third tape-deck I had borrowed & tried failed to actually play a tape, and the goodwill stores etc. didn't have any for sale, but I was determined not to buy a new one because WHO THE HELL BUYS A NEW TAPE DECK IN 2010?)
Ok. So now you need to figure out the cord situation, which you probably already have in a drawer somewhere because ipods have made it so everyone has stereo-mini everything. you just need to plug that stereo-mini cable into the input of your computer and make sure the setting is for a line-in instead of the built-in mic on your Mac. (god help you if you use a PC, I have no idea how they're supposed to function and you should probably just give up).
Now you need the most important thing, a freeware program called Audacity that allows you to change audio files a variety of different ways. Audacity is kind of confusing, but also kind of intuitive if you have ever screwed around with audio software before, or even a 4-track. Screw around with it, you'll figure it out. Audacity needs to be in record-mode (with the pause-button pressed) in order for your tape player to come through the speakers on your computer. check the levels, cue that shit up and record it. Then export it, (Audacity will prompt you to download their mp3 converter called LAME, which you will need if you want to make an mp3. you can also do this in iTunes). Now you name it move it to it's new home in the ether and have a beer or 3.
The sound quality is not great, but the source was a tape, remember? whatev's. at least it can be done. One more bit of advice, don't wait to do this because the tape-players of the world are dying faster than the polar bears, and you know you have tapes that need to change platforms before the landscape shifts again and we're all uploading playlists to bio-wave formats or something that require cranial-implants. (which would be awesome).
Dig.
- buzzsaw
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ya cranial implant would rock !
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