Taperssection.com
Gear / Technical Help => Ask The Tapers => Topic started by: dropthis on May 28, 2009, 03:45:25 PM
-
Hi all,
1st post is a question, hoping you can help me out if anyone has been in a similar situation!
I used to trade heavily about 8-10 years ago and I have about 150 tapes in my collection. My dual deck died in 2002 and I basically stopped trading -- I haven't even had a cassette deck to play them until last week! So I have begun transferring them to my computer/CD, but now I'm wondering exactly what to do with all these tapes!! I'd like to be tape-free but due to the whole 'trading etiquette' am not willing to sell them and I'm not terribly interested in trading for more shows at this stage. What are my options besides trashing them (which seems like a tremendous waste!!)?
-
hi. welcome :)
id say:
1. keep em in storage. in case you ever need em again
or
2. give em away to ppl you know that like those bands
by the way...you are converting them to lossless from the tapes to digital right?
-
Give them away? Always someone new to trading/collecting who would want them.
-
hi. welcome :)
id say:
1. keep em in storage. in case you ever need em again
or
2. give em away to ppl you know that like those bands
by the way...you are converting them to lossless from the tapes to digital right?
thanks for the quick response. they are stored all over my house! (150 were live shows, prob about another 150-200 of others) that's why i finally picked up a cassette deck so I can get rid of the clutter. I have about 15-20 masters that I'll keep but that's probably about it. #2 seems like a more reasonable idea I guess.. Are people open to trades for weird stuff? like ipods/empty hard drives/etc? or is that considered 'profiting'..?
on the 3rd question, i am saving them as .wav's for now in an ancient version of cool edit (2000) -- I am a total noob when it comes to digital trading/archiving so i'm not sure the best way to keep the file size down truthfully. (any help here is appreciated too! /links, etc)
-
Cool Edit is still a great program...even though it has been out a while.
-
Maybe you could take a few at a time to your local record store or your favorite local venue to give away. You could take 8-10 at a time with a sign that says "free tapes!" and I'm sure that people would be interested in them.
-
This will probably seem like heresy to some, but as my old cassettes get digitized, they are being re-assigned to wherever the Portland City Dump is located. I've got - literally - between five and ten thousand cassettes, and I've been dragging them around for years. Moving across the country from Minneapolis to Portland convinced me that I'd better give the task of conversion my best effort, and then be done with it. The .wav files are all painstakingly examined for flaws, notes are compiled in .txt files, and the audio is then saved to level 8 .flac files. I'm not even burning CD-Rs anymore, except for bands I've recorded who still like that format.
As for passing the tapes on to someone else, that just seemed like a good way to pollute the pool somewhere down the road. I suppose that will still happen, as I share the digitized files with people, since everyone and their mom is a "re-master" expert these days, but my intent is to simply preserve and share the original, raw files. What happens after that, is fair game for anyone, I guess. I feel bad enough about dumping all this plastic out there, but really, the artifacts themselves only have as much value as someone wants to put on them. I've got the music in a much more accessible form now, I think.
-
hi. welcome :)
id say:
1. keep em in storage. in case you ever need em again
or
2. give em away to ppl you know that like those bands
by the way...you are converting them to lossless from the tapes to digital right?
thanks for the quick response. they are stored all over my house! (150 were live shows, prob about another 150-200 of others) that's why i finally picked up a cassette deck so I can get rid of the clutter. I have about 15-20 masters that I'll keep but that's probably about it. #2 seems like a more reasonable idea I guess.. Are people open to trades for weird stuff? like ipods/empty hard drives/etc? or is that considered 'profiting'..?
on the 3rd question, i am saving them as .wav's for now in an ancient version of cool edit (2000) -- I am a total noob when it comes to digital trading/archiving so i'm not sure the best way to keep the file size down truthfully. (any help here is appreciated too! /links, etc)
This is just my personal opinion, but I don't consider it unethical to sell them for the cost of a blank tape (i.e., maybe $2 a tape). A person can certainly erase them if they don't want them, and all you are paying for is the value of the materials themselves, not what's on them. Like I said though, just an opinion. With my DATs, I "exchanged" them to someone by basically giving them away - but in exchange for that person converting the ones I wanted to FLAC. But if someone who had nothing to exchange wanted to buy them for $3-4 a tape (i.e., cost of a blank DAT), I personally would have felt OK about taking that.
-
hi. welcome :)
id say:
1. keep em in storage. in case you ever need em again
or
2. give em away to ppl you know that like those bands
by the way...you are converting them to lossless from the tapes to digital right?
thanks for the quick response. they are stored all over my house! (150 were live shows, prob about another 150-200 of others) that's why i finally picked up a cassette deck so I can get rid of the clutter. I have about 15-20 masters that I'll keep but that's probably about it. #2 seems like a more reasonable idea I guess.. Are people open to trades for weird stuff? like ipods/empty hard drives/etc? or is that considered 'profiting'..?
on the 3rd question, i am saving them as .wav's for now in an ancient version of cool edit (2000) -- I am a total noob when it comes to digital trading/archiving so i'm not sure the best way to keep the file size down truthfully. (any help here is appreciated too! /links, etc)
convert the wavs to flac using a program called traders little helper: http://tlh.easytree.org/
flac still keeps the files lossless but it compresses them down to reduce the filesize. its what most ppl use nowadays. just curious, what kind of bands do you have? any hard rock/metal stuff?
-
tape after life
http://lifehackery.com/2008/11/04/various-13/
-
convert the wavs to flac using a program called traders little helper: http://tlh.easytree.org/
flac still keeps the files lossless but it compresses them down to reduce the filesize. its what most ppl use nowadays. just curious, what kind of bands do you have? any hard rock/metal stuff?
thanks for the tip!
most of the stuff I have is from 311 (about 50+ shows), Sublime, 2 skinnee j's, shootyz groove, rage, phish, dmb, yolk,some ska shows (pilfers/reel big fish),
looks like my old website is still accessible thru the internet archive (but can't make any claims as to how accurate this still is)
http://web.archive.org/web/20001006152321/www.angelfire.com/ny/amayz/FullList.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20001006180550/www.angelfire.com/ny/amayz/List2.html
(I was quite obsessed with 311 when I made the site, so forgive the background!)
edit: looking back at that site makes me look like I felt I was pretty entitled back then! (posting things that I wouldn't trade, etc) haha
-
I'd love to hear the P-Funk and wu-Tang tapes if you find them...
-
I would check and see if any are already in circulation - If they are I would try and track down already transfered copies (i.e. BitTorrent and the like)
If you have shows that are not in circulation I would ask to see if someone here might transfer them for you.