Thread: Transcribing old tapes to digital

Some friends of mine had a punk band back in the '90s. They made some recordings and were just getting into the studio when the lead guitarist got a brain tumor and died shortly after. The whole thing fell apart after that and the recordings never went anywhere.

I recently discovered that another mutual friend still has all their old tapes. I would really like to get these converted to digital but paying a recording studio to do it is just too much $$$ for my poor ass.

The tapes range from 1/4" to 2", some are mixed and some are the raw tracks. I'd like to get all this stuff transcribed but the problem is finding someone with the vintage equipment to do this for a reasonable price.

Any suggestions? Any maggot hookups in the Seattle area?

1/4" reel to reel decks aren't hard to find. All you need to do is plug an RCA to Miniplug cable into the output and into your computer's "line in" jack that's on virtually every desktop audio card ever made.

Open up your Sound Recorder (under "Accessories" in Windows) hit record and hit play. You end up with a .wav file that can be converted to anything.

Same would go for the other formats, but you'd have to find a deck.

Might cost a fortune but Steve Albini's studio in Chicago, Electrical Audio, probably has the analog equipment. No idea how much a rough mix and master would cost.

Maybe some recording school kids could do it as a project?

Yeah, getting it onto the computer isn't the hard part, it's finding someone with the right equipment.

Doesn't need to be mixed/mastered, just recorded straight from tape to digital is all I need. I can mix stuff myself. There are a couple of songs they did that everyone remembers from back in the day. I'd like to get them finished & be able to play them at get-togethers next year where I will run into some of the original band members and old friends who remember the band. We had some wild times together back in those days, would be fun to surprise them with this.

Part of the problem is that I don't know enough about these old tape formats to talk intelligently to people about them. I just know there are various width tapes in the collection. How many tracks could be on a 1/4" tape? If more than two, doesn't the deck have to have the right number of heads to match the tracks on the tape?