Earlier today I posted the following on twitter as part of a conversation as to whether it was better to out source the digitisation of several hundred cassette tapes:
The answer is more complicated than twitter allows, so I though I'd expand it.
Cassette tapes were phenomenally popular during the roughly thirty year life of the tape cassette as a mainstream format. Not only were they used for student party tapes but were extensively used to record court transactions, music, including performances by non mainstream performers, and spoken language. So not surprisingly they form a huge resource for linguists, anthropologists and the rest.
Not only were cassette recorders cheap, the media was also cheap and universally available, be it in rural Turkey or Morocco or in high street discount stores.
The tapes did fail and jam in players, which is why no roadside was complete without a sprinkling of dead cassettes and flickering strands of cassette tape. The fact this is no longer the case is because they're not used anymore - most informal and non professional recordings are on USB sticks these days.
When we visited Sri Lanka six years ago all the drivers we had were already using USB sticks to play pirated Indian and Korean pop music.
This leads to a problem - no one much makes cassette decks anymore, and equally no one makes cassettes in volume, and more importantly these handy little kits you got to unjam, rewind and generally repair broken cassettes.
Searching on ebay for 'blank cassette tapes' does bring up a range of choices, but they're expensive, and certainly not the cheap universal medium they once were. Likewise, it's still possible to buy cassette players, the more expensive professional equipment can be difficult to track down.
So, the the first question is do you have the kit to record the data.
Tape cassettes are of course analogue, but you can copy a cassette's content to digital media by connecting a cassette player's output socket to the microphone input socket on a pc and using some suitable software to capture the input and perform the analogue to digital conversion. You can buy devices that claim to do the conversion for you, but I've no experience of how well, or badly they perform.
However, doing a simple direct conversion is probably fine for a few tapes, At a little over an hour for a C60 or and hour and a half for a C90 tape, it will be tedious, but possible. At least you'll have plenty of time to transcribe the label and any other information that comes with the tape.
The problem or course is that your tape player will most probably be at least ten years old, and the tapes will be equally old, and you need to have a plan B, or at least a spare tape player in case of equipment failure - remember the more tapes you have the more likely your old tape player will fail.
Equally, the more tapes you have the more likely tape failure becomes, and you need to have a plan to repair cassettes which break and jam, and you need people with the skills to repair damaged cassettes.
There used to be such things as high speed tape duplication machines which basically ran the cassette through eight or sixteen times as fast, and while you could conceivably use one of these to speed up the digitisation process, but remember that old tapes are more likely to fail and break due to being stressed by being played at high speed.
And this of course means that you really do need to have access to someone who works with the media and can repair both the devices and the tapes.
One place I worked, we had a project to recover and preserve culturally significant tape recordings and we had a couple of people whose job was basically to scour ebay for spares, maintain old tape recorders, and if necessary repair old broken decayed tapes.
That expertise is hard to find - you basically need to find and employ some old school sound engineers who have worked with a range of equipment and still have all their old skills.
That project was now over ten years ago, so it's important to remember as time goes on these skills are harder and harder to find as increasingly all the old school sound engineers and tape technicians are out of the workforce enjoying a well earned retirement.
So, it can be done in house, and if you are already set up to digitise analogue tapes it is a fairly straightforward, if tedious, exercise. Likewise if it's only a few tapes, and they're not critically important you could probably track down a decent quality cassette deck in working order and do it yourself - it's simply a decision as to whether outsourcing is cheaper than doing it in house.
If you've a lot, and the contents are valuable, I'd certainly seriously consider employing a specialist external company to do the work ...
The answer is more complicated than twitter allows, so I though I'd expand it.
Cassette tapes were phenomenally popular during the roughly thirty year life of the tape cassette as a mainstream format. Not only were they used for student party tapes but were extensively used to record court transactions, music, including performances by non mainstream performers, and spoken language. So not surprisingly they form a huge resource for linguists, anthropologists and the rest.
Not only were cassette recorders cheap, the media was also cheap and universally available, be it in rural Turkey or Morocco or in high street discount stores.
The tapes did fail and jam in players, which is why no roadside was complete without a sprinkling of dead cassettes and flickering strands of cassette tape. The fact this is no longer the case is because they're not used anymore - most informal and non professional recordings are on USB sticks these days.
When we visited Sri Lanka six years ago all the drivers we had were already using USB sticks to play pirated Indian and Korean pop music.
This leads to a problem - no one much makes cassette decks anymore, and equally no one makes cassettes in volume, and more importantly these handy little kits you got to unjam, rewind and generally repair broken cassettes.
Searching on ebay for 'blank cassette tapes' does bring up a range of choices, but they're expensive, and certainly not the cheap universal medium they once were. Likewise, it's still possible to buy cassette players, the more expensive professional equipment can be difficult to track down.
So, the the first question is do you have the kit to record the data.
Tape cassettes are of course analogue, but you can copy a cassette's content to digital media by connecting a cassette player's output socket to the microphone input socket on a pc and using some suitable software to capture the input and perform the analogue to digital conversion. You can buy devices that claim to do the conversion for you, but I've no experience of how well, or badly they perform.
However, doing a simple direct conversion is probably fine for a few tapes, At a little over an hour for a C60 or and hour and a half for a C90 tape, it will be tedious, but possible. At least you'll have plenty of time to transcribe the label and any other information that comes with the tape.
The problem or course is that your tape player will most probably be at least ten years old, and the tapes will be equally old, and you need to have a plan B, or at least a spare tape player in case of equipment failure - remember the more tapes you have the more likely your old tape player will fail.
Equally, the more tapes you have the more likely tape failure becomes, and you need to have a plan to repair cassettes which break and jam, and you need people with the skills to repair damaged cassettes.
There used to be such things as high speed tape duplication machines which basically ran the cassette through eight or sixteen times as fast, and while you could conceivably use one of these to speed up the digitisation process, but remember that old tapes are more likely to fail and break due to being stressed by being played at high speed.
And this of course means that you really do need to have access to someone who works with the media and can repair both the devices and the tapes.
One place I worked, we had a project to recover and preserve culturally significant tape recordings and we had a couple of people whose job was basically to scour ebay for spares, maintain old tape recorders, and if necessary repair old broken decayed tapes.
That expertise is hard to find - you basically need to find and employ some old school sound engineers who have worked with a range of equipment and still have all their old skills.
That project was now over ten years ago, so it's important to remember as time goes on these skills are harder and harder to find as increasingly all the old school sound engineers and tape technicians are out of the workforce enjoying a well earned retirement.
So, it can be done in house, and if you are already set up to digitise analogue tapes it is a fairly straightforward, if tedious, exercise. Likewise if it's only a few tapes, and they're not critically important you could probably track down a decent quality cassette deck in working order and do it yourself - it's simply a decision as to whether outsourcing is cheaper than doing it in house.
If you've a lot, and the contents are valuable, I'd certainly seriously consider employing a specialist external company to do the work ...
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