bulk cassette digitizing... short cuts?

[jefvTaon]

hi, 300 cassettes to digitize and wondering if anyone's got a good system?

my idea is to use a tascam 4 track to get them over into DP5.13 all in one pass at double speed and on all 4 tracks (with 2 being backwards)...90 minutes playtime reduced to 22. then, once in, flip the the 2 backwards ones and move them after the front wards recorded tracks. then try to find a way to cut the speed/pitch in half. a search i found here said to put it in a sampler to do that, which sounds about right, but how do i bounce it ? the only real time recording i want to do is when it goes into the daw. what about recording at 82.20 originally, then when i reduce by half its 44.1.... will that help somewhere? can i half it with Kontakt and convert the file to get it in iTunes? i'd like them to all end up as apple lossless. any advice would be appreciated, thanks!

[HCMarkus]

You will likely lose a fair amount of high frequency information running the cassette at double speed then slowing down the tracks. But if speed is more important than quality, your approach might just work.

You might try a little clock trickery if you have an external clock (and if you can make this go, let us know, 'cause I've not tried it myself... I've only had to fix mistakes from 44.1k to 48k or vice-versa.)
1. Set DP session to record at 88.2k sample rate
2. Set your master clock to 44.1k
3. Record
4. Re-label soundbites as 44.1k (without altering soundbite files in any other way), set your clock to 44.1k and change your session to 44.1k playback.

Don't know if this will work, but if the tracks will play at 44.1k, you can avoid other digital shenanigans to get the tracks to sound at pitch.

PS: I'm still waiting for an inexpensive clock that will allow me to simulate tape deck VSO. I used to like to do that with ADATs. Guess I could just buy an old ADAT... My religion (please excuse the reference James) does not allow me to spend a lot of money on a clock.

[jefvTaon]

hey thanks for the info... i will try it when i have the dude helping me out next week.
anyone else have any opinions?
thanks, jef

[glamacchia]

How about getting 12 decks, all with auto reverse and bring in 12 stereo channels at once. Sort your tapes by length so the passes are pretty much fully utilized. i.e don’t load a C 120 full on both sides in dec 1 and a single sided c-30 in dec 2.

Flipping / reversing tracks, trying to keep track of what tape is where, speed shifting, what sound bight corresponds to each tape can become a big headache not to mention the time you’ll spend doing that is longer than if you just did it.

I have several dual well cassette decs that can play Tape 1 side A, auto reverse play side B, B ends and it jumps to tape 2 side a auto reverse side B. If you are just doing a quickie to CD I’d keep it simple and record the project at 16/44.1 with a file type that allows you to place your track markers where you want and go to CD as easy as possible. Most I ever did was 3 decks at a time into DP and even that can be a lot to keep tracks of.

If you want to go to Apple loss less to iTunes I might look at a MPEG’r app. Audio Recorder rings a bell and I recall another app from MAC os 9 days that I used for monitoring multiple POTs lines that would automatically start recording and create a new file at each silence break.

There are some batch processing apps SWITCH if you get the full version (Like $25) that you can automate to process an entire folder of files and convert to another format and specify the save to directory.

If you are going to be doing restoration, denoise, mastering, sound on sound etc and the tapes are sonically in good condition, I would up the sample and bit.

Remember 300 C-60 tapes is over 7 40 hour work weeks just to play them!


(PS I've done play back pitch control (Vari speed with the house synch) while recording vocals and DP for me would just stop clocking all together when I went past a certain point.. like +/- 10% perhaps)