CD Listen Through... slightly paused. TAPE listen through, however...

[the_eggwhite]

I'll restart this again soon, but I've not been spending much time at the PC lately. I've also just started working on ripping my old tape collection to mp3, which is slow going. To do one rip takes as long as listening to the tape twice. Once to rip it, once to slice it into tracks. For albums where track divisons are clear I could probably speed the second pass up quite a bit by skipping ahead, but that's not always possible. Audacity even has tools to identify tracks and slice them automatically... but I've not messed with those just yet.

Then again, it is making some of the more \m/ METAL \m/ end of my music collection is going to become available for listening again. Which will be quite cool.

So, here's a few brief notes from in the midst of the tape ripping process for your general entertainment:

The Almighty - Soul Destruction
I'd forgotten how much I like this album. I should acquire it on CD at some point... or at least buy better quality (ie: not tape ripped) mp3s. I'd generally say it's more hard rock than metal, although it's a tough distinction to call. It's a good, old fashioned guitar-based rocker of a kind that we just don't see enough of these days. I have more albums from this lot on tape somewhere... I wonder where they are?

Curve - Horror Head EP
It's Curve, who are one of my favourite bands of all time, so of course I'm going to like this. "Falling Free" is a bit of a departure from the rest of the EP due to the thumping beat that sits behind it all, but it all still works.

Next...
I'm leaving my tape ripping device (basically a walkman with a usb connection and a built in soundcard) going whilst I wander off for lunch. I'm ripping "Copper Blue" and "Beaster" by Sugar (they're back to back on the same cassette). I'll follow them up with "File Under Easy Listening".

Comments

[evilref.livejournal.com]

I find when ripping vinyl with Audacity you can normally spot the track divisions in the waveform, from the changes in texture. Once you've done that, finding the lead-in/lead-out points just requires listening to the beginnings and ends of the tracks, not the whole thing.

Or, on the recording, you can note the time as the tracks end, and use that as your starting point.

[eggwhite.livejournal.com]

You usually can, but on albums where they've decided to run songs into each other it gets a bit more awkward!

Audacity has a "Silence Finder" that'll do it for you... but unfortunately it can't tell the difference between a gap between tracks and a pause / quiet moment in a song.

Thankfully, I'm not actually listening to everything twice - the ripping process happens silently in the background. Because the doodad I'm using is effectively it's own soundcard, I can even do something else whilst it's ripping. I could technically slice up the previous album whilst ripping the next, but I've generally been doing other things.

I just have to listen to a) hear the music and comment on it and b) tell where the track breaks really are - so far the software's had about a 60% success rate.

The rip is unattended, but the listening-and-commenting can't be... and I'm doing the slicing at the same time as that.