My Meat Loaf tapes will live forever!

Curious weekend. I heard from Smilin’ J, who demurred from my discussion about him back in the day. Apparently he’s just come upon my writing, and far from wanting the tee shirt, he demanded that I set the record straight on what I had said about him. And so I will: In 1993, without question, Jason Baldwin almost smiled. There is photographic evidence of this event, available upon request.

There. Done. All inaccuracies in this blog have now been adjudicated.

So I don’t think I’ve gone into detail on the Great Tape to Pod project, although I know I’ve mentioned it. Back when the mists of prehistory hadn’t yet settled on the papaya trees, I remember reel-to-reel tapes, where you could fit three albums on one side of a tape. At that time everything was LPs, which meant you popped up to change the record every twenty minutes or so, unless you had a record changer that dropped one record on top of another in a process guaranteed to turn your vinyl into chopped liver. The process of getting up to turn or change the record was rather sacramental, and regular. But as I say, the tapes meant you got up once every two hours or so, which fit in well with college life. I never owned one of these players myself, but I envied those who did. The players were the size of a small buffalo.

Cassette tapes came into their own in the ‘70s with the arrival of the Walkman. When I first moved to Manhattan I had already begun the process of copying all my LPs (and there were a lot of them) over to cassettes, and acquiring most of my new music on more cassettes. I was never much of a Walkman fan back then, because I enjoyed walking around without distraction, enjoying life on the hoof as it happened. It wasn’t till I moved to the ‘burbs and began running in the mornings that I started going through a series of ever-breaking Walkmen. Meanwhile I continued to acquire cassettes, often dupes from library borrowings. I’ve never had too much music. And I’ve gone through a lot of phases: rock, jazz, cabaret, opera, classical, shows, tropicalia, etc. When I run out of new things to listen to I will no doubt be dead. “He who is tired of music is tired of life,” to once again bring up Dr. Johnson (although, of course, he said London, but no one but a blockhead ever quotes anyone other than Dr. J).

There are, in the chez, enough cassettes to provide musical entertainment for each and every soldier on both sides of the Global War on Terror (or GWOT, as it is known), except I admit that I have very little Islamic stuff except for a few guitarists and Cat Stevens Version 2.0, so Osama is going to have to make do with various versions of the Cajun favorite, “Don’t Mess with my Toot Toot.” In any case, as life has progressed, these cassettes have gravitated to the chez basement. I do my daily constitutionals nowadays not with Walkmen but with the Nano and the latest from my favorite podcasts. The only time I plug cassettes into the regular stereo is Christmas, because whereas I had no compunctions about upgrading, say, the White Album to CD, I’d be damned if I was upgrading “Elvis’s Christmas Album.”

I have followed the idea of copying down cassettes to mp3s for a while but never gotten off the old duff until an article a couple of weeks ago in the Times. They simply said that a copy of Toast on the old Mac would set you on your way, and that was good enough for me. The lesson here is: Don’t always believe the New York Times. All the news that’s fit to print, and half the technical data. Feh! I ended up buying a new amp, plus Toast, plus an iMic. But in the end, the setup works fine, thus:

Play cassette (which is hooked up through the amp and out the headphone jack through the iMic into the Little Elvis USB). This is a real-time process, which means I’ll be doing this forever. Yesterday I moved some chezian furniture to ameliorate the process. There’s a program called CD Doctor which is part of Toast, and you use that to record the cassette. Set the recording time for 45 minutes, and go off and read a book.

When the recording is done, you send the waveforms to CD Doctor. At this point the program attempts to separate the tracks, but its accuracy is not perfect, so you may need to do some readjustment at this point, on a macro scale. If nothing else, you delete the extra time at the end (the empty track, if any). And if a song in a mix is something you already have on disk, you can delete it and take it off the conveyer belt.

Next, you have two choices. First, you can send the material to Toast, for burning as a regular CD, and I’ve been doing that for show music. I haven’t heard Camelot, for instance, since King Arthur was in the White House. And Carousel. And Merrily We Roll Along. Those were among this weekend’s haul, all going straight to regular old CDs. Works like a charm, and those I play through the main house system, which is the usual show tune venue. I mean, I have a few shows on the MegaPod, but that’s not usually the kind of music I listen to when I’m listening to the pod, whereas nothing goes better with the Sunday Times than Broadway. Go figure.

Alternatively, you can send the music to iTunes. Here I save them as mp3s (there are other choices). No biggie. Then I copy the stuff over to the MegaPod and listen to it in the office. These are all unlabeled tracks, and at this point, as I intimated in an earlier entry, I’ve got a lot of unknown music by unknown performers. Yeah, I can recognize the Beatles more often than not (we’re talking about a hundred mix tapes here), but I do trip up on those deep Jo Jo Gunne cuts. But as you listen to the music, you plug guesses about the lyrics into Google, and nine times out of ten you see a hit for the lyrics giving the name of the song and the performer. After that, Wikipedia and iTunes one way or another set you on the path for verification. So as you listen to the music, you carefully list (and if necessary, acquire) all the track info and save it out. (Later on, if you’re so inclined, you can even pick up album art from Amazon or the like.)

Sometimes a track is complete, one song, and that’s that. Sometimes it’s more than one song, or it’s fuzzy and needs processing. In these latter cases, you go back to the computer and open the song in Audacity, process it as necessary, including breaking it up into separate tracks, and export out as mp3s. Replace the old mp3s with these new mp3s both on your hard drive and in iTunes.

Next, attach the iPod back home. First you delete all the tracks from the iPod. You still have all the original tracks you recorded, pointing to the files on your hard disk, in iTunes. Plug in the new track info into these tracks in iTunes, and when you do iTunes also updates the actual file. Then you copy all the music over again onto the iPod, and you’ve got edited—if necessary—tracks with complete info. Finally, you back up the tracks on your hard disk so you’ll never have to do all this nonsense again.

And that is how I plan to spend my summer vacation. You learn a lot in this process. For instance, there are two King Biscuit Boy tribute sites (at least), and Jo Jo Gunne (yeah, they’re real) has reunited. Who knew? As far as I know, by the way, I possess no hiphop tracks. No gangsta music. No Celine Dion (which makes gangsta rap sound like Mozart). But if any turns up, I’ll let you know.

Yo!