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the “tapes to mp3″ project: 9 years of hard labour

Tuesday, October 5th, 2010 | Gadgets, Misc, Tech-savvy

Music always played a big part in my life, so it’s only natural I own a lot of media containing music, mainly CDs, some records and … TAPES. Literally hundreds of them. With CD ripping being an easy task I completely switched to computer / iPod playback. This left me with a pile of old beloved handmade tapes I used to listen to a lot. So I decided to record my tapes and convert them to mp3 for safekeeping and nostalgia reasons. I was dreaming about a complete set of my tapes, all available by the click of a mousebutton.

I am well known to be somewhat neurotic about the things I do. Well, that’s okay with me, I keep comparing myself to Terry Pratchett’s Victor Tugelbend, who is too lazy to carry extra weight thus goes to the gym regularly.

In a sense which his tutors couldn’t quite define, much to their annoyance, Victor Tugelbend was also the laziest person in the history of the world. Not simply, ordinarily lazy. Ordinary laziness was merely the absence of effort. Victor had passed through there a long time ago, had gone straight through commonplace idleness and out on the far side. He put more effort into avoiding work than most people put into hard labour.
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People who didn’t apply themselves to the facts in hand might have thought that Victor Tugelbend would be fat and unhealthy. In fact, he was undoubtedly the most athletically-inclined student in the University. Having to haul around extra poundage was far too much effort, so he saw to it that he never put it on and he kept himself in trim because doing things with decent muscles was far less effort than trying to achieve things with bags of flab.

If I am in control and keep everything aligned I don’t waste time looking for a specific document or tool. I like that. But this time my morbid obsession for perfection became a curse that haunted me for almost 10 years … but, the task has been done. It’s finished. Finally.

I started the project in 2001 and finished something like a week ago. (this really should have been a blog post entitled “10 years of hard labour” …) Here are some stats:

• first tape recorded on October 7th, 2001
• recorded over 300 tapes all together (did I mention I deleted ~50 recordings by mistake at some point?!)
• 15 days 15 hours 48 minutes and 32 seconds recording time
• 1935 files including scans and the html file

As I wanted the “backup” to be as accurate as possible I did not only record the tapes (using decent sampling and compression rates) but also scanned the covers, inlays and tapes themselves. This became a very tedious job indeed! The tapes should also be arranged in the way they used to sit in my shelves. You can see the outcome for yourself opening this page, containing an HTML representation of my shelves and each tape linked to its playlist, containing side a and b of that tape. I did not upload any actual music as each tape consumes ~90 MB of data.

Apart from putting an enormous effort into this I really enjoyed listening to long lost treasures. I now have my tape collection available simply by opening the HTML file and selecting a tape. Wonderful!

Tags: mp3, tape recording, terry pratchett

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