[Maybe OT]British Library National Audit of Sound Collections

[Jim web]

In article <20150518113734.GA21641 at bytemark.barnyard.co.uk>, David
Cantrell <david at cantrell.org.uk> wrote:
>

> And remember, most recordings are made on media that was cheap at the
> time. Long-term stability over a period of decades was definitely not a
> concern of the manufacturers, nor was it a concern of most of the people
> making recordings.

Sadly, often true.

[snip]

>  So I bought a decent cassette deck, and a few modern
> commercial recordings just to make sure I had everything working
> properly. The commercial recordings played back OK, so I started feeding
> old demo tapes in and transferring them to CD. About half of them had
> very serious problems such as the tape getting tangled up, or
> stretching. After a dozen or so I just gave up.

You may have been unlucky. In recent years I've used a 2nd hand cassette
deck to make digital versions of many of my old cassettes. Up to now that's
worked fine for over a hundred tapes mainly made in the 1980s. (I switched
from R2R at the start of the 80s.)

That said, the tapes are Maxell, and the deck a Nak Cassette Deck 2. So the
deck may be treating the tapes more kindly than many decks.

Despite all that, though...

> It's probable that an institution like the British Library could recover
> the content from all those cassettes relatively easily, but even so, it
> would be time-consuming and there are probably hundreds of thousands of
> cassette recordings that are worth preserving, all of which are slowly
> degrading.

Yes. FWIW with R2R I did do some transfers at x2 speed if the quality of
the initial tape was poor as that speeds things up. But it still takes
time. That said, digital recording and then de-clicking LPs can be even
more of a faff! 8-/

Sorry, OT again! :-)

Jim

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