Cassette To MP3

FINALY ARCHIVING MY COLLEGE MUSIC MEMORIES

It finally arrived! I ordered a cassette to MP3 converter to digitise my large collection of cassettes.
I was around when the world was making the big transition from analogue to digital media. Like many people from that time, I have a large stash of analogue (film) photographs, music and even video.

I have managed to digitise the majority of my photos by scanning the negatives into high-resolution digital files and archived away, but I never got round to doing it for my musical cassettes and VHS video tapes. Ironically, the latter are the more vulnerable, hence urgent, ones. Analogue film, especially black and white, can probably outlast any digital medium (hard drives) if properly kept. Cassettes on the other hand, being magnetic tape, have a natural lifespan even if kept in optimum condition.

I had been putting off this project for a while, mainly due to procrastination in buying the required device and concerns around quality. I finally pulled the trigger the other day because it occurred to me that the quality doesn’t actually matter, rather the essence of the whole tape. What I mean is this; most of the songs, except the really obscure ones and personal recordings, are now available via streaming services all over the Internet at much higher quality even than the original cassette. If I really wanted to listen to a high quality copy of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti songs, they are available online to purchase or stream. What I’m really preserving is not the song, but rather the memory of it being mixed for me by a good friend, for example.

Talking of Fela Kuti, I have picked this one as my first tape to preserve this way.

Where to archive?

There quite a number of cassettes to archive, but since they will be MP3 files, they will not toke up too much space. I could possibly fit all of them on one 250GB flash drive and make multiple copies. In fact, that's what I'm going to do regardless of what other options I pic. However, since I want to share the music and the process, I will still need some kine of online storage for the music files.

My first thought was DSound, but I just realised that platform seems to be offline right now. That would have been the perfect place to put it for sharing purposes. My next thought was SoundCloud, which is looking like the most probably place. I also considered YouTube, but I'd have to create video files in order to host them on YouTube, which is an extra step I don't think I'm willing to make (for now anyway). Besides, most of those files would trigger copyright flags and I may end up losing my account.

I also had another idea. If I add some comments, historical info and context to the files via audio, I can make it into a sort of podcast or "show" format, which I could then upload to Anchor (for free). Unfortunately though, I don't think I'd be able to embed that into a Hive post. I don't want to send people away from Hive to Anchor. I'd rather have it play inline here on Hive. Perhaps a skilled dev out there can make it happen for us.

As it is now, it's looking like SoundCloud. I can host my files there, and I can embed in Hive. The only thing is I don't like the design of the SoundCloud widget, but I guess I could live with it for now.

So let the digitisation project begin!

Peace & Love

Adé