The Big Digitization Of Cassette Tapes

Today I finally finished digitizing all of my techno and house cassette tapes. It took me a little bit over two months. Here are some statistics:

• 290 "a" sides
• 278 "b" sides (sometimes the tapes broke after the first side)
• 12 tapes which unusable
• 41 tapes which turned out to be copies of CDs which are available to buy
• 5 tapes were copies of stuff I have also on CDs which are not available to buy
• 8 tapes had unreadable labels
• 249 GB in 16 bit 48khz WAVE files
• the whole list
  

I probably still have some tapes flying around somewhere and my girlfriend also has some, but the vast majority of my music is digitized now. The music is mainly mixed techno and house DJ sets, from my friends like DJ Gomez, Motik and Nitin. A lot of sets are recorded from radio like HR3/HRXXL and Hithouse Stuttgart and in clubs around Stuttgart and Cologne. The most popular DJs are Sven Vaeth, Roland Casper, Richie Hawtin, DJ Hello, Dag, and Laurent Garnier.

I used my little python tapetransfer script, which I wrote for this purpose. It basically waits until there is music and then records until there is a longer break, which is perfect for DJ mixes and rubbish for normal music CDs. I recorded everything with the same level, which means that some tapes are really quite now, but the alternative would have been to play every tape twice. If it turns out that some tapes are too quite I will record them again in 32bit and normalize. I probably write another script to find out the level of each wav file.

In the end it didn't take me as long as I expected, I usually managed to do one tape before work and maybe three in the evening and a bit more on the weekend.

All that is left now is converting them to flac and mp3. The files have to be tagged and named more consistent. Another idea is to also scan pictures of all the tapes and add this to the music files.

And listening to all of them again, but I already found some real gems.

Quick weekend hack: statistics on Richie Hawtins DJ set tweets

Richie Hawtin recently started to post the records he is playing on twitter. He is using Traktor while he plays, which now has a new plugin which allows this functionality. Others have posted about this and what it means for techno music enthusiasts, DJs and the music industry.

I think it is one of the few good applications of twitter and I decided to hack something together to display this information in a little bit nicer way.

I created a site at sets.krass.com which gets the tweets from twitter and generates a list of DJ sets and a top10. As Hawtin is the only DJ I know who uses this application the overall top10 is not much use, but it shows the potential.

This is my first project using symfony and I was surprised how good it worked for this task and how easy it is to get started.

If you have problems accessing the site, come back a bit later, there seems to be a problem with one of my secondary DNS servers.

Some thing I have planned for the future:

• add links from the tracks to krass.com, discogs and co. It is a bit difficult, because artist names are not always present or correct
• add more DJs, if you know of someone also using this kind of tweets give me a shout
• make the combining of tracks into sets better (at the moment I just use the day) and allow more sensible names for these
• pages with tracks listed by artists and links to the artist pages

That is enough for today though, because it is bloody hot here in Barcelona.

Sonar 2009 - krass.com

The Sonar 2009 - krass.com pages are up. This is probably the last time I do this, as it is just too much work and nobody else is helping me with the wiki.

Sonar is doing a special offer of 125 EUR for the general pass for the three days. The normal price is 140, which is the same as last year. Maybe they realize that they can't raise it every year. Some of the parties were very empty last year.

My music podcast selection

This are the music podcasts I am listening too at the moment. It is mostly techno, but also house and some dub. And whatever last.fm thinks I would enjoy.

dailysession	http://dailysession.com/?feed=podcast
DE:BUG POD - a netaudio podcast	http://www.de-bug.de/pod/wp-rss2.php
electro house & house & techno mix	http://djbene.podspot.de/rss
Galaktika Records Podcast: Minimal, Electro and House hottests tunes!	http://www.galaktikarecords.com/podcast.xml
Ibiza Voice Music Box	http://www.ibiza-voice.com/music/rss_podcast.php
Last.fm free recommended downloads for cdamian's	http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/2.0/user/cdamian/podcast.xml
Minimal(maximal) Techno DJ mixes by Louis de Bourbon	http://www.graphicjuice.co.uk/podcast/podcast.xml
MinimalNet	http://www.minimalnet.org/feed
Minus Podcast:	http://m-nus.com/podcast.xml
NetAudio Russia	http://www.netaudio.ru/feed
Resident Advisor podcast	http://www.residentadvisor.net/xml/podcast.xml
Starfrosch - Free MP3 Download - Acid	http://starfrosch.ch/download_music/acid/feed
Starfrosch - Free MP3 Download - Breaks	http://starfrosch.ch/download_music/breaks/feed
Starfrosch - Free MP3 Download - DJ-Mix	http://starfrosch.ch/download_music/dj_mix/feed
Starfrosch - Free MP3 Download - Drum and Bass	http://starfrosch.chdownload_music/drum_and_bass/feed
Starfrosch - Free MP3 Download - Dub	http://starfrosch.ch/download_music/dub/feed
Starfrosch - Free MP3 Download - Electronic	http://starfrosch.ch/download_music/electronic/feed
Starfrosch - Free MP3 Download - House	http://starfrosch.ch/download_music/house/feed
Starfrosch - Free MP3 Download - Minimal	http://starfrosch.ch/download_music/minimal/feed
Starfrosch - Free MP3 Download - Techno	http://starfrosch.ch/download_music/techno/feed
the fabric podcast	http://feeds.fabriclondon.com/fabricpodcast

I would upload the OPML file, but blogger.com doesn't allow attachments.

M_NUS @ BAM

Went to see Magda, Gaiser and Richie Hawtin at the Red Bull Music Academy M_NUS @ BAM.

It started at midnight, which is a more civilised time than the usual 3:00 we get here in Barcelona.

Magda was very good, Gaiser was ok and Hawtin had his good moments. I think Hawtin now has the same problem as Sven Vaeth, he is just too popular and his productions and studio mix sessions are way better than his live sets. It is a pity, because I remember a lot of good parties with him a few years ago.

The visuals were also especially good, I have to find out who created them. Also very minimal, abstract and like a good screensaver. It wasn't a projection, but a enormous LED display wall with one part below the DJ desk.

Very good times, can we have more of this please?