Tape

Even though my good tape decks are broken at the moment I have started on the software to transfer my techno and house mix tapes to the computer. I have written the software before in C++. It basically waits for a sound on the input and then writes the music to a file until it notices a long quiet section at the end of the tape and stops writing. The software was using threads and used the lame lib to do on the fly mp3 encoding, to make it even quicker to digitize tape. It also notified the user of any buffer underflows and clipped samples. This software is more than five years old now and all the libraries have changed and I can’t be bothered to fix it all. As I want to learn python anyway I decided to rewrite it in python and see how good I can make it. Documentation for the (multiple) alsa bindings for python is pretty bad, so I googled around and found kissrec , which is a very simple command line audio recorder with a timer and VU meter. It is GPL, so I have started with that, but I probably rewrite the whole thing to make it (in my eyes) nicer code. You can find the whole thing at http://tapetransfer.googlecode.com/ , but please don’t look to closely - it is rather ugly at the moment.

First my nice 32" LCD TV broke, which is annoying. But the TV is easily replaceable, it just takes some money. At the moment I am just using an old 21" CRT TV monitor instead, because it is no good to work on any more. But now my beloved Sony TC-KA6ES tape deck broke. It was the best tape deck Sony ever produced. A three motor, three head and Dolby B/C/S monster with manual tape calibration and a weight of half a ton. I haven’t used it for at least two years and this is probably the reason why it broke. Our flat here in sunny Spain gets pretty warm in the summer and it is also a very dusty city. This week I wanted to use it again, because I am working on a little python software to help me to transfer my many tapes to the computer. But now all I have left is a rubbish Technics deck. I could try to find another good tape deck on ebay, which would set me back 100 to 350 Euro, depending on the deck. I also checked what new decks are available, but all of those are on the cheap end. I am very much in vintage territory now. I realized of course that tapes are not commonplace any more, but they vanished from the high end since five years or so now. The other option is to find someone to fix the Sony, because it is probably just some rubber band or a dirty part. Fast forward and rewind still works and all the motors seem to work. But while repair shops like this are pretty common in Germany and London, they are difficult to find here. I might also try to fix it myself, as I can’t break it much more than it already is. I finish this post with a picture of my also lovely and broken Sony TC-C5. This one is a very rare five tape auto reverse changer. The tapes are on a carousel. I used it a lot in my time in university to record long techno and house mix shows on the Stuttgart radio. Depending on the tapes it gave me five to ten hours of music. It probably has a similar problem as the TC-KA6ES.