I had work experience in the sound department of the BBC in the late 1980s (I was still at school and considering it as a career). When I arrived the big story was some new metal reels for the 1/4in tape machines. They had arrived from the factory without being filed down, so the edges of them were razor sharp! A spinning disc of razor-sharp metal! The fault was realised quickly but not before one or two sound engineers had ended-up with bloody fingers. Their response was to put a pile of the blood-covered metal reels on the manager's desk with a note saying that they weren't suitable...
I wanted to join the BBC in the late 80's (1986 I think...) as a transmitter technical assistant. I used to work for Tandy's part time while at college and got to talk with a couple of chaps from the Sutton Coldfield transmitter station who came in to buy some bits and pieces. I was studying for my A-levels in electronics, maths and physics and had passed my radio amateur exam, they suggested I did a tour of the facility and had an initial interview which went nicely and then went to London for a formal interview. It was an absolute nightmare! I got dropped off outside central London, had to get my way in by tube for the first time, the heavens opened and I got drenched - I got lost but found Broadcasting House and got barked at by the receptionist because I couldn't find my tube ticket because everything was sticking together. I wasn't that bothered about the expenses but that really set the mood for the whole experience. Total disaster - I was so damn nervous and I didn't perform at the interview and failed. But in retrospect I'm pretty glad I didn't go down that route. I've always had an interest in broadcast and have worked with a consultancy in the DTV testing and conformance sector but have spent most of my career in the semiconductor industry as an applications engineer. With the sell-off of the broadcast infrastructure in the 90's and the commercialisation of services I'm glad I chose the path I chose. Nice to hear from someone else who almost but didn't :)
A very weird moment for me, I suddenly had a memory of buying shirts and trousers in Marks and Spencers about twenty years ago when I heard the Nikita cover. Weirdly clear I could remember a lot of detail.
@@Feuerspray31 anything associated with a certain memory can trigger you to remember it. It might be a song, smell, taste or sound that triggers it and it can be very nice indeed.
@@jonathaneastwood2927 I really hope you're just being a troll and you've not meant that as an insightful response. Unless you are like the person I worked with not long before that point who insisted on not watching or listening to anything more than 5 years old. He took the piss out of the fact I was reading a novel while we worked together so I suspect he wasn't a great reader. He wasn't an unpleasant guy but you'd not want him on your pub quiz team.
@@mallockarcher I for one think their comment is genuine and a bit funny ; it shouldn't be surprising that shops playing background music can't afford the rights to play the very latest hits :-)
I restore/digitise tapes for a living. The bunching you're talking about at the beginning isn't related to the mould but tends to be caused by the tension of the tape being uneven during storage. As temperature and humidity change over time it pushes and pulls the tape, expanding and contracting it in an uneven fashion until it buckles
@@ShyStudios best way? You need to kill the mould. Baking in a scientific oven (don't use your home oven!!) between 45-52 Celcius works best. Don't use chemicals. Then open cassette, brush off excess mould (don't expect to remove much, most will stay on the tape) with very soft brush. FFW and REW tape, open cassette again and clean out with soft brush again.
so that is why companies store their long term backup tapes for the servers in salt mines. constant temp and humidity. Or more accurately constant temp and humidity that does not require mechanical systems which can fail.
Probably should have cleaned the tape with a microfibre cloth and isoprophyl while spooling. I do that for mouldy VHS tapes. Works a charm. Dont forget to clean your reel players head and rollers to remove any mould that might have rubbed off!
And don't forget to clean behind you ears and under your foreskin at least twice a week. Its also very important to de-ice your freezer once a year and always shave with the grain. Christ (-:
@@chrisphobia I don’t get your response. I clean VHS tapes all the time with 90% alcohol while I spool them. If you put a mouldy tape through the player the spores if active will contaminate the next tape you play and even if they aren’t active it will gunk everything up and audio quality will suffer. Bassquake is giving very good advice.
@@chrisphobia Stupid and unnecessary reply. If those mould spores are still active they will contaminate other tapes played on the machine if it hasn't been thoroughly cleaned. Bassquake's advice is good advice to follow.
I just laughed so hard at myself. I produce music and often use a DAW, when the 'Name that tune' bit came up there was one I wanted to hear again. I was proper spun out when I tried to grab the progress bar in the vid instead of the progress bar for the vid hahahaha
Can relate. I work with train simulators and when watching videos involving them, sometimes try to change the camera angle and wondering why it doesn't work.
Your level of self-deprecation is admirable. You're intelligent and entertaining regardless of if you know how to properly splice tape. Enjoyed the watch, thank you.
Eh he could've done far worse. I started splicing 8 tracks in 2010 at 13 years old and I can make them and Muntz 4's work again to this day. Not trying to say I'm any better or worse, merely an observation
For name those tracks, those are: #01 : Barbra Streisand - Woman In Love #02 : Elton John - Nikita #03 : Stevie Wonder - Part time lover #04 : The Pasadenas - I'm doing fine now #05 : Gregory Abbott - Shake you down #06 : Bryan Adams - Every thing I do... #07 : Cher - Love and understanding #08 : The Turtles - Happy together #09 : Michael Jackson - Liberian girl #10 : Ryan Paris - Dolce Vita
Audacity was absolutely fine, but the spyware thing is down to whether you think that the telemetry data they're collecting now constitutes spyware. Personally, the way audacity is being handled leaves a bad taste in my mouth, but it's far from the worst bit of spyware on most users' systems (Windows itself is much worse for example).
Figuring out how to extract music off old tapes like this seems like a lot of fun. I had fun watching at least. I really liked the synth sound they used for the vocal melody in the Bryan Adams song.
I have wanted to rescue a friend's broken 8-track cartridge copy of her wedding by using a reel to reel machine, but I'd imagine I'd have to mask a section of the r2r machine's head to isolate tracks. I haven't figured out how to do that effectively :-(
@@ericsills6484 With broken you mean that the splicer tape has come off? Because that's easily fixed. There are some 8-track enthusiast groups on FB, they will be happy to help, or point you to someone in your area who can do it for you if you're not confident doing it yourself. Doing it on your r2r won't work at best, and will ruin your r2r head *and* the tape at worst.
Your splicing has improved since the last time :D But seriously, even if this tape isn't that valuable, it's practice for when you get asked to conserve something priceless ;)
I would personally just have tried to loosen up the tape. You can use sewing machine oil, or any of the purest and smoothest oils and just soak a few drops into the spool, let it all sit for a while, and then wind the tape fully while using some old cotton strips to take off any excess oil as the tape spools around for a few cycles. The lubrication will make everything nice and smooth again, and you get to keep everything in the cartridge. Also the mould is technically "alive". having it run through your TEAC machine deposited spores everywhere on it. Those spores can infect other tapes. Be sure to disinfect the TEAC machine sooner rather than later. I suggest just using pure alcohol in a spray bottle and hose it off like a madman. After the alcohol evaporates and the spores are dead, you'll be good to go.
@@BryanTorok All cartridges like these or 8track or jinglemachine cartridges have a coating of gravite on it. Never oil or silicone. Old knowlidge... 😇
This is a really great primer on how to rescue audio from a tape. Not even the specific techniques you use, but all the detail of things to watch out for and work around. Like the tape loop not being at the end and it being flipped and some of the tracks being reversed. Always entertaining and informative and often instructional! 👍👍
Interesting video (as usual). Now you've saved the audio, I'd be tempted to give the reel a wash and transfer it back into the cartridge. See if you can get it playing again in its original form. If you knacker it up, no big shakes as you've already done the salvaging.
Ive never messed with audio file so this was all friggin magic to watch. Its nice you save some auditory history, even if its only as a warning from the past.
i dont know if you have any grandchildren but man as a kid, you're the grandfather i would have loved to visit! always been fascinated in gadgets since young. love your channel and how real and down to earth you are. Christchurch NZ 🙂
Having a pixel 6pro on your lock screen it lists songs it hears and it nailed all of them frightening new technology. Splicing tapes takes me back. Once I had to recover a tape which had been in the wreckage of a boat at sea then washing and spooling it just like you did hear but I then had to produce multiple copies to compact cassette tape for evidence.
Thank you for continuing to produce content on a weekly basis. I love waking up on a Saturday morning with my cup of Dunkin coffee and watching the new release from Techmoan!
First sample is "Woman In Love" by Barbara Streisand. #6 is "Everything I Do" by Bryan Adams. 8 is "Happy Together" by The Turtles. #9 is "Liberian Girl" by Michael Jackson.
Thank you! Quite apart from the always excellent content on a personal, um, note I appreciate your preserving this kind of thing - every one of those tracks will have been the result of a group of musicians hard work and creativity, along with that of studio engineers. It would be a shame to discard the fruits of their labour that may exist nowhere else, especially as recordings take up no actual space these days.
Very evocative....of trudging around behind my parents in now long gone department stores, usually in the department with net curtains, plastic woven floor mats etc! Wedge shaped double sided speakers hanging off the ceiling on chains wafting the music overhead at an appropriate volume.
Only tangentially related to this video... Thank-you so much for resolving a 30-odd year mystery for me: It's "Ryan Paris - Dolce Vita". Amazing! Also, your outro is one of the best in the business IMO
As far as I'm concerned, this is one of the best channels on RUclips. Whether it's checking out 100-year-old wax cylinders, reviewing dishwashers, sorting through 100+ minidisc players, or whatever the case may be, I know the content here will be humorous, well produced, and interesting. Thank you, sir!
For years, I used the cart machine at a radio station to play my show disclaimer every episode. When the station finally went digital, they mothballed the machine--but I kept my old disclaimer cart as a souvenir. I share your fancy for damnable old technologies, and the cart machine certainly fits that theme.
Another great video! As I was born in 1988, I've never really got to use tape recordings other than some Disney's VHS lol. But I have to say that watching you playing around with all those amazing cassette and reel-to-reel players kinda hooked me up to audio tape recordings. Thanks for what you do and for putting that much into it! Cheers, Yoann
I recovered several VHS camcorder recordings from the mould using demake-up cotton discs embedded with isoprophyl alchool, slicing then by the widht of the tape, placing them at the two sides of the tape, closing carefully the VHS tape protection on top of it and putting the cassete inside a VHS rewinder.
This was mesmerizing. Your step by step process was really enjoyable to watch and seriously the work you did in audacity would have been impossible at the time these were recorded :) particularly how quickly it was done. Amazing how audacity works. Thank you Mat!
as a history lover, especially towards anything and everything "mundane", i appreciate when people keep these old records alive and restore them as best as they can. It a way to remember what life was back in the day. It might seem useless waste of time for some, but not for me personally
I agree. When I'm listening to original tapes or records on the original equipment, I'm listening to history. If a tape or a record is beat up, it only means it has a story. Maybe a little daughter of the record owner scratched the record. Maybe that muffled 8-track sat in a hot car for years and has traveled 100k miles. I find that more interesting than "hey Google, play music".
@@erwintimmerman6466 I have an old vinyl copy of Sgt Pepper (the label on it indicates it was pressed between 1969-1972, so not a first pressing but still quite old) that has a lot of minor surface-level scratches around the edges. I like to imagine that the original owner was someone with really long nails lol
Just want to share a funny story... i live in the usa, so your new videos come out at like 5/6am for me. The sound and your voice have trained me to go to bed because your videos are the last ones i watch before i go to sleep for the night
I think you used the audio software absolutely fantastic you could teach me a lot in fact you do teach me a lot and I appreciate you and watch your content every time it comes out you're awesome dude
Also all the deal about Audacity being crap now is mostly limited to _now_ specifically, using an older version solves all problems and I don't even know if there's any advantage between versions a few years old.
@@Kalvinjj honestly, it didn’t look much different from the versions I used heavily circa 2009-2012! I’d certainly not be inclined to install every single update Just Cos.
That was a LOT of work, I'm impressed by your tenacity. I was also surprised by the quality of the audio that was played in those tiny clips, considering all that had happened to the tape and who knows how many times it was played when it was a current item.
I like to call it historic preservation, something so very few people are interested in these days. Someone went to a lot of trouble to produce those titles and you respect them by preserving them in your own way. I really commend you for it and I hope it would encourage others to do the same. I have old cassettes I would love to copy over to my PC before the worst happens to them. I bought new belts for my old twin deck, it plays beautifully and I will be 'backing up' the tapes in due course. Thank you for your inspiration :) I know you can buy digital versions of 99% of my tapes but it's not the same. The dynamics are not the same, the listening experience is not the same. It's easy to hit 'Play' with a mouse button and go off and do something else but it is an entirely different thing hitting play on a relay tape deck, hearing the clunk click and waiting for the track to start, first complete silence, then (depending on the tape/deck) that warm muffled noise before your music starts and watching the counter tick away and the VU dancing up and down... simply beautiful.
Great work. Although its a little bit MUFFLED. There's two reasons (both fixable) - the handheld recorder will have an upper frequency limit of 20khz. Halving the speed means you halve the upper frequencies to 10khz. Everything higher is lost. Rerecording with a high res recorder capable of 40khz should fix this problem. - The 90/3180uS IEC/NAB playback curve on your R2R doesn't match the tape which has a different curve to suit its slower playback speed. If I had to guess it you should be applying the cassette eq of 120/3180us. Only it should have been halved because the tape speed was doubled (60/1590us). You can apply an eq correction in audacity (the difference of what the deck applied vs what it SHOULD have applied) which is tedious to calculate but will yield near perfect results. Or you can just take an educated guess and boost the high frequencies by around 10-12db and start to apply them somewhere around 2-4khz and everything above. The lowest frequencies have the same problem but you can probably safely ignore this unless bass thump is overpowering. Most likely this music doesn't have much of that so it won't really matter.
Interesting how much bass there is, but then, if you're running it at double speed, if the correct speed playback circuitry has the bottom end of the frequency curve drop off at 50Hz to cut mains hum, running it at double speed means you're recording down to 25Hz off the tape, or half whatever the previous low end cut-off was on the tape head and preamplifier circuitry was. As other commenters have pointed out, it of course doubles your highest frequency through the analogue path, so needs to be sampled at twice the maximum frequency reproducible by the player. Thank you for making your videos, they are a treat to look forward to :)
You could now quite readily put the tape back onto its own reel and have it available to run in its intended machine. I have to deal with a lot of mouldy tapes. Video8 are particularly time consuming because the mould is stronger than the tape and will cause it to snap. I've built a de-moulding rig for this purpose.
Ofcourse it is worth it. This is exactly what the hobby is for. A hobby is just doing things for the sake of doing them. It doesn't always have to make sense or be the easiest or most efficient way of doing things.
Goodness, I remember my dad playing around with reels like that, he had similar kit for fixing tape. Been some 25 years now but I think I finally found the proper respect for that stuff.
1) Barbra Streisand - Woman in love 2) Elton John - Nikita 3) Its on tip of my tongue, but u can kill me, I cant remember 4) Dont know 5) Never heard of it 6) Bryan Adams - Everything I do (I do it for Robin Hood) 7) Love and understanding, but its not Cher 8) The (teenage mutant ninja) Turtles - Happy together 9) Very familiar 10) Little less familiar
3) Stevie Wonder - Part Time Lover Well done on the Barbara Streisand one, I didn't get that but you're right. Can't get 4, 9 & 10. I keep thinking that #10 is something like Bucks Fizz or something, it's super poppy. Hope someone can help us.
@@solojinglesradio1 Yes, I've seen a few people say that. I'm not familiar with the song myself. And #4 is 'I'm Doing Fine Now' by New York City (never heard that one) and #9 is 'Liberian Girl' by Michael Jackson (don't know that one either). Cheers!
Using Audacity that way is exactly what the software is made for! No need to apologize etc. :). But one idea I might add: Your recorder should be able to record both "left" and "right" channels into individual files as track 1 and track 2 or so, so the editing process in the software has a few mouse clicks less :).
For anybody curious about the "Audacity is spyware" aside, it's a ridiculous overreaction by some extremists in the open source community. The Audacity team introduced automatic updating and error reporting in the app, which got blown out of proportion as spyware. It's still one of the best (and safest) wave editors, and you should it if it does what you need.
Thanks for clearing that up. I've used Audacity for years and really like it. Think I'll keep using it, but I might stick with my pre-updating version for now.
Completetly off topic, as a young teenage something in the early 80's my mates dad gave us a Sony FM transmitter / DJ mixer, with line input, built in popup mic and telescopic aerial. It had a cross fade slide poteniometer so we could mix ourselves in and out of the music, We played around with it for a while tuning into each others show as we lived closeby, until someone told us we could go to jail, so my mate smashed it up, as the fear of a custodial sentence was to much for him to bear. I've since looked on the Internet for such a device from that era with no avail. I was wondering if anyone else had seen, heard or played with similar and wanted to remind myself of it purely for sentimental reasons as my mates dad sadly passed, and he instilled in me my love for everythng electronic. Any offers of a description or model number would be greatly recieved. Thank you for the time and effort that you put into making these short clips, they are greatly recieved and it's great to watch a conservator at work.
Another fantastic video I didn’t know I wanted to see! You actually save me a small fortune in playing with stuff I wish I had. Watching it is enough these days!
I thought you were going to just physically clean the mold off the tape -- I had no idea you would go through all this work. But I agree that it's definitely worth it to preserve that undoubtedly obscure and rare music. And I enjoyed watching you do it
What an awesome job saving that cart, Mat! Please consider uploading those tracks to The Internet Archive (archive.org) along with the rest of the carts. Maybe at 24/95 if your recorder supports it as well. Some of us could even cut them up properly into files and identify them if you don’t have time. The Internet Archive will automatically make MP3s and put up a streaming player as long as you upload the high-resolution file.
@@CasinoWoyale While it's perfectly understandable if he doesn't want to upload these, there are plenty of still copywritten but 'abandoned' or ephemeral works on the Archive. The worst that would realistically happen is the rights holders file a takedown; no one is going to seek damages for this.
Nothing I like better than watching cart videos. When copying analog, higher speed allows for better quality, less hiss. I'm thinking that if you slow speed by half in digital, wouldn't you be decreasing the bit rate? Decrease quality? You have the magnetic thing that allows you to see the tracks. Using that would have shown you the end of a song...
Good job, Matt! As a veteran of complex tape editing from decades ago and sound editing today, I would have done a few things a little differently. First, there's no telling what mold scraping past mag heads would do to both the heads and the sound, so I would have tried to clean off as much mold as possible before passing anything thru the tape head path. There may be a safe solvent -- I don't know what chemical, but someone might know -- but even without a solvent, running the tape gently past a folded, soft, lintless fabric like disposable Webril Wipes wouldn't hurt the tape, but would take off some mold. The standard tape EQ curve is not the same for different speeds, so you might want to experiment with adjusting the EQ in Audacity before producing a final signal to record. Using a spectrum analyzer might also be educational, since this tape must have passed the playback heads many, many times, and the heads might not have been demagnetized often (if ever). This would degrade the freq response, especially in the high end. This concern with EQ purity is only for the extremists! Lastly, you could bypass the machine's head transport path for the rewinding, and threaded the tape directly from reel to reel. This would minimize any mag shedding and mold transfer. Again, probably only something a purist would care about! Next, we'll tackle some old tapes that have gummed up from chemical changes...
Hi Matt, thanks for another superb vid. If you intend keeping the tape, unspool it, put it in a bowl of water and fairy liquid, shake it a bit then dry it thoroughly. The mould should then go. After all you don’t want any unnecessary mould in your house…yuk!
I thoroughly enjoyed this video and your resurrection attempts. I've had to perform the same type of audio recoveries on one-off cassette tapes which involved removing of cassette tape from the cartridges, replacing the tape into a re-usable cartridge, fast forwarding or rewinding the tape (carefully), removing the tape from the re-usable cartridge, baking the tape (where sticky tape syndrome is the issue) and then again replacing the tape in the re-usable cartridge for playback and transfer to digital format. At the end the tape and original cartridge were disposed of unless there were special logo's or printing on the cartridge that the client wanted for sentimental reasons. In one case they actually wanted new tape inserted into the original cartridge and the digital music transferred back to cassette for sentimental reasons. I use either ProTools or WaveLab for most of my digital recording and editing although I also use Capture (PreSonus) for remote recording work and then transfer the audio into either of my two main systems for the actual editing and processing operations.
Brilliant, seriously, the best youtube channel - the most professionally made and you're a natural. Every one is like a little adventure. One thing - those of us who grew up during the heyday of magnetic tape as the medium of choice will have it drilled into us not to handle the stuff - keep greasy fingerprints off it? Like the video flap said: 'do not touch the tape inside'. Did they lie to us, Mr T? Also, what happens if you splice using sellotape? Thanks once again for another great vid. I'm signing up to Patreon imminently.
Just a tip to Techmoan when recording those songs in High Speed to Digital is to set the recorder to 88khz/24bit or higher so you can still have a perfect data when slowing it down, recording it at 44khz/16bit is just the same as recording in 30fps then slowing it down to 15fps, so doubling the sampling rate actually give you more data when slowing down the audio just like Slow-mo footage, I hope that helps in your future video restorations and preservation project.
I agree with the other comment(s) about having done the hard work. Now, clean the tape after you remove the leader you spliced on, re-join as you said at the place you cut it, wind it back onto its original spool, oxide out and put back a new foil like an 8 Track repair, where it was and reassemble your now working cartridge. If you didn’t waste any of the tape where the audio was, you have now restored it more or less. But you might want to clean the tape path on your reel to reel deck !
Excellent video, I had so many thoughts while watching that I had to make notes not to forget them by the end: 1 - Makes you realize that mold is a much bigger challenge in endless-loop cartridges (8-track, 4-track, broadcast carts, etc.) than in open-reel or the various 2-spool cassette formats. 2 - putting the cart spool on the R2R, my first thought would be to try to tuck the inner end back in the inside, but I expect you tried that and couldn't. Then you brought out the WD40 lid with a hole drilled in it - absolutely brilliant, that would never have occurred to me. 3 - metal reels needing a spacer - here in the US, all the metal reels I've seen from the 80s on had an extra metal layer screwed on in the hub area to bring them to the same thickness as plastic reels. Some decks with wider reel turntables that were concave instead of flat required a spacer from the outside of the hub to the outside of the turntable, but if the turntable was flat, the metal reels were fully interchangeable with plastic reels. Very weird to me that the hub area of yours is thinner than a plastic reel, and isn't properly held by the deck's spindle. 4 - your youtube content match comment - I literally laughed out loud and clapped. 5 - Audacity being spyware? 1st I've heard that, but I certainly wouldn't be 'in the know'. I really hope not... I've never heard of any open-source software being spyware/malware.
It's only a recent thing with Audacity 3.0 and later--it was acquired by Muse Group who say in their Ts&Cs that they will collect limited personal information to "improve the app", and that this can both be sold and given to law enforcement. Obviously there's no user account or anything like that in Audacity so you'd assume what they can harvest is limited, but the fact they're doing it at all in what's nominally an open source application is what has people's backs up.
@@d2factotum Indeed, though I believe that in light of the outcry they've reversed the policy. Before then there were a couple of forks, but since the policy change those have been abandoned as unnecessary. If the people motivated enough to make a fork are satisfied with the about-face, that's good enough for me.
@@d2factotum Thanks for the info. I'll keep that in mind and check the status before whenever the next time is that I have occasion to use it. Severely disappointed that an open-source app would pull this crap, especially one as otherwise/previously excellent as Audacity.
@@d2factotum You appear to be trapped in the past. Specifically May 2021. Have you read the privacy policy since then? It was updated to say "telemetry is strictly optional and disabled by default". It's very easy to see if a program is phoning home, and no-one has found Audacity to be phoning home unless you allow it to.
![Kodak Black - Catch Fire [Official Music Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/A4ch-olIuZo/mqdefault.jpg)
I had work experience in the sound department of the BBC in the late 1980s (I was still at school and considering it as a career). When I arrived the big story was some new metal reels for the 1/4in tape machines. They had arrived from the factory without being filed down, so the edges of them were razor sharp! A spinning disc of razor-sharp metal! The fault was realised quickly but not before one or two sound engineers had ended-up with bloody fingers. Their response was to put a pile of the blood-covered metal reels on the manager's desk with a note saying that they weren't suitable...
Funny that companies were still trying to make garbage products even back in the 80s! If you have any similar stories I'd love to hear them.
Epic story 🤣
I imagine the reaction from the manager: "Oh great, now i have to do my job...".
I wanted to join the BBC in the late 80's (1986 I think...) as a transmitter technical assistant. I used to work for Tandy's part time while at college and got to talk with a couple of chaps from the Sutton Coldfield transmitter station who came in to buy some bits and pieces. I was studying for my A-levels in electronics, maths and physics and had passed my radio amateur exam, they suggested I did a tour of the facility and had an initial interview which went nicely and then went to London for a formal interview.
It was an absolute nightmare! I got dropped off outside central London, had to get my way in by tube for the first time, the heavens opened and I got drenched - I got lost but found Broadcasting House and got barked at by the receptionist because I couldn't find my tube ticket because everything was sticking together. I wasn't that bothered about the expenses but that really set the mood for the whole experience. Total disaster - I was so damn nervous and I didn't perform at the interview and failed.
But in retrospect I'm pretty glad I didn't go down that route. I've always had an interest in broadcast and have worked with a consultancy in the DTV testing and conformance sector but have spent most of my career in the semiconductor industry as an applications engineer. With the sell-off of the broadcast infrastructure in the 90's and the commercialisation of services I'm glad I chose the path I chose.
Nice to hear from someone else who almost but didn't :)
The note was written with their own blood, I presume?
I named every song. I can’t remember them all, but I named the first one Graham. Seemed fitting.
😂🤣
Appropriate, it's a real cracker.
What about your gram? I hope she's well these days.
Thanks :D
@@themoviedealers 😅🤣😂🤣😅
A very weird moment for me, I suddenly had a memory of buying shirts and trousers in Marks and Spencers about twenty years ago when I heard the Nikita cover. Weirdly clear I could remember a lot of detail.
Those are the best memories. It always weirds me out though. Why did I remember THAT?
@@Feuerspray31 anything associated with a certain memory can trigger you to remember it. It might be a song, smell, taste or sound that triggers it and it can be very nice indeed.
Nikita was a mid 80s track so way more than 20 years ago!
@@jonathaneastwood2927 I really hope you're just being a troll and you've not meant that as an insightful response. Unless you are like the person I worked with not long before that point who insisted on not watching or listening to anything more than 5 years old. He took the piss out of the fact I was reading a novel while we worked together so I suspect he wasn't a great reader. He wasn't an unpleasant guy but you'd not want him on your pub quiz team.
@@mallockarcher I for one think their comment is genuine and a bit funny ; it shouldn't be surprising that shops playing background music can't afford the rights to play the very latest hits :-)
I restore/digitise tapes for a living. The bunching you're talking about at the beginning isn't related to the mould but tends to be caused by the tension of the tape being uneven during storage. As temperature and humidity change over time it pushes and pulls the tape, expanding and contracting it in an uneven fashion until it buckles
fascinating! thanks!
What's the best way to clean mold off tape? I have a few cassettes that have white mold just like the tape in this video.
@@ShyStudios best way? You need to kill the mould. Baking in a scientific oven (don't use your home oven!!) between 45-52 Celcius works best. Don't use chemicals. Then open cassette, brush off excess mould (don't expect to remove much, most will stay on the tape) with very soft brush. FFW and REW tape, open cassette again and clean out with soft brush again.
so that is why companies store their long term backup tapes for the servers in salt mines. constant temp and humidity. Or more accurately constant temp and humidity that does not require mechanical systems which can fail.
@@owenbutcher Ill give that a try, I actually have a lil low temp oven I use for evaporating stuff
"Good luck content matching that one youtube" easily my favourite part of the whole video. Sticking it to youtube 🤣
I laughed out loud!
You are the Bob Ross of electronics . Great content.
Happy little tapes; they live right here.
I love this comment :)
You could call each failed audio format a happy accident. Especially when TM gets his hands on one 😁
"let's play some happy little tapes"
Love it! Totally spot on!
15:43 Woman In Love's Cover 15:45 Nikita's cover, 15:56 Part Time Lover's Cover, 16:15 Gregory Abbot, 16:36 Happy Together's Cover, 16:45 Liberian Girl's Cover, 16:55 Dolce Vita's Cover
Cheeeeeeesy! Thanks!
6. Everything I Do - Bryan Adams
4 Loco In Acapulco? Sure sounds like it
5 Shake You Down
7 Cher Love and Understanding
Probably should have cleaned the tape with a microfibre cloth and isoprophyl while spooling. I do that for mouldy VHS tapes. Works a charm. Dont forget to clean your reel players head and rollers to remove any mould that might have rubbed off!
And don't forget to clean behind you ears and under your foreskin at least twice a week. Its also very important to de-ice your freezer once a year and always shave with the grain.
Christ (-:
@@chrisphobia I don’t get your response. I clean VHS tapes all the time with 90% alcohol while I spool them. If you put a mouldy tape through the player the spores if active will contaminate the next tape you play and even if they aren’t active it will gunk everything up and audio quality will suffer. Bassquake is giving very good advice.
Tweaking the head azimuth would help also.
@@chrisphobia Stupid and unnecessary reply. If those mould spores are still active they will contaminate other tapes played on the machine if it hasn't been thoroughly cleaned. Bassquake's advice is good advice to follow.
@@kevinh96 I don't think anything about chris' advice is bad either hahaha
I just laughed so hard at myself. I produce music and often use a DAW, when the 'Name that tune' bit came up there was one I wanted to hear again. I was proper spun out when I tried to grab the progress bar in the vid instead of the progress bar for the vid hahahaha
Can relate.
I work with train simulators and when watching videos involving them, sometimes try to change the camera angle and wondering why it doesn't work.
Yep, do it for the fun. It doesn't have to be worth it, nor optimised, just a pleasure. And it's good to see the process, mistakes and all.
Video: uploaded 20min ago
Comment: 6d ago
@@Mitch_Rogoff Techmoan releases his videos on Patreon early as an unlisted video.
It was fun to watch, and looks like more fun to do.
Isn't that what a hobby is?
@@Mitch_Rogoff Read the fucking description.
Your level of self-deprecation is admirable. You're intelligent and entertaining regardless of if you know how to properly splice tape. Enjoyed the watch, thank you.
I feel like it’s only an attempt to get ahead of know-it-alls in the comments…!
Eh he could've done far worse. I started splicing 8 tracks in 2010 at 13 years old and I can make them and Muntz 4's work again to this day. Not trying to say I'm any better or worse, merely an observation
"was that it!?!"
For name those tracks, those are:
#01 : Barbra Streisand - Woman In Love
#02 : Elton John - Nikita
#03 : Stevie Wonder - Part time lover
#04 : The Pasadenas - I'm doing fine now
#05 : Gregory Abbott - Shake you down
#06 : Bryan Adams - Every thing I do...
#07 : Cher - Love and understanding
#08 : The Turtles - Happy together
#09 : Michael Jackson - Liberian girl
#10 : Ryan Paris - Dolce Vita
“Good luck content-matching that one RUclips” HAHAHAHAHA that was awesome
Audacity is absolutely fine. I've used it professionally for years. The spyware thing was a complete overreaction. Keep doing you, buddy!
Audacity was absolutely fine, but the spyware thing is down to whether you think that the telemetry data they're collecting now constitutes spyware. Personally, the way audacity is being handled leaves a bad taste in my mouth, but it's far from the worst bit of spyware on most users' systems (Windows itself is much worse for example).
for sure there is so much of those types of stories on the net .
@@richardbrobeck2384 I loved that movie!
@@FaultyStreams
What, there's a movie about Audacity?
@@unduloid From what I can tell, the last two words of his comment were "The Net".
Figuring out how to extract music off old tapes like this seems like a lot of fun. I had fun watching at least. I really liked the synth sound they used for the vocal melody in the Bryan Adams song.
At first I thought that one was "I Want To Know What Love Is," because the synth was so Foreigner-y.
I have wanted to rescue a friend's broken 8-track cartridge copy of her wedding by using a reel to reel machine, but I'd imagine I'd have to mask a section of the r2r machine's head to isolate tracks. I haven't figured out how to do that effectively :-(
i knew it right away lol
@@ericsills6484 With broken you mean that the splicer tape has come off? Because that's easily fixed. There are some 8-track enthusiast groups on FB, they will be happy to help, or point you to someone in your area who can do it for you if you're not confident doing it yourself.
Doing it on your r2r won't work at best, and will ruin your r2r head *and* the tape at worst.
The tape broke somewhere in the middle. I got a splicing kit, but was not successful with it. I just had to scrap it.
For one who is still learning, you have displayed a certain proficiency in preserving these recordings. Nice work.
Your splicing has improved since the last time :D
But seriously, even if this tape isn't that valuable, it's practice for when you get asked to conserve something priceless ;)
I think your splicing was pretty good Mat! 👍
I would personally just have tried to loosen up the tape. You can use sewing machine oil, or any of the purest and smoothest oils and just soak a few drops into the spool, let it all sit for a while, and then wind the tape fully while using some old cotton strips to take off any excess oil as the tape spools around for a few cycles.
The lubrication will make everything nice and smooth again, and you get to keep everything in the cartridge.
Also the mould is technically "alive". having it run through your TEAC machine deposited spores everywhere on it. Those spores can infect other tapes.
Be sure to disinfect the TEAC machine sooner rather than later.
I suggest just using pure alcohol in a spray bottle and hose it off like a madman.
After the alcohol evaporates and the spores are dead, you'll be good to go.
Oil and tape are not friends.
@@zorktxandnand3774 Those tapes were lubricated with something, maybe a silicone lube.
@@BryanTorok All cartridges like these or 8track or jinglemachine cartridges have a coating of gravite on it. Never oil or silicone. Old knowlidge... 😇
but because if the molt are they not about to die
I do video tape conversions... on mouldy tapes I add a few drops of isopropyl alcohol to loosen the mould.
This is a really great primer on how to rescue audio from a tape. Not even the specific techniques you use, but all the detail of things to watch out for and work around. Like the tape loop not being at the end and it being flipped and some of the tracks being reversed.
Always entertaining and informative and often instructional! 👍👍
Interesting video (as usual). Now you've saved the audio, I'd be tempted to give the reel a wash and transfer it back into the cartridge. See if you can get it playing again in its original form. If you knacker it up, no big shakes as you've already done the salvaging.
Ive never messed with audio file so this was all friggin magic to watch. Its nice you save some auditory history, even if its only as a warning from the past.
i dont know if you have any grandchildren but man as a kid, you're the grandfather i would have loved to visit! always been fascinated in gadgets since young. love your channel and how real and down to earth you are.
Christchurch NZ
🙂
love watching him aswell. Auckland, NZ
11:23 Congratulations you have just rescued a rare Chipmunks special 😅
Auto generated subtitles "Stevie Wonder cover" = "stevie undercover". That just lifted the video a whole level.
1: Woman in Love
3: Part-Time Lover
5: Shake You Down
7: Love and Understanding
8: Happy Together
Having a pixel 6pro on your lock screen it lists songs it hears and it nailed all of them frightening new technology.
Splicing tapes takes me back.
Once I had to recover a tape which had been in the wreckage of a boat at sea then washing and spooling it just like you did hear but I then had to produce multiple copies to compact cassette tape for evidence.
I collect VHS, and tape mold is the bane of my collecting existence. Getting a tape clean is so satisfying, though.
Awesome job saving this audio!
The taunt at 11:16 cracked me tf up.
Thank you for continuing to produce content on a weekly basis. I love waking up on a Saturday morning with my cup of Dunkin coffee and watching the new release from Techmoan!
First sample is "Woman In Love" by Barbara Streisand. #6 is "Everything I Do" by Bryan Adams. 8 is "Happy Together" by The Turtles. #9 is "Liberian Girl" by Michael Jackson.
I really enjoyed this, love it when you rescue recordings.
glad you were able to restore those chipmunk song covers
If you analyse how the (original) Chipmunks achieved their results pre-digital, it was actually quite impressive. They had to sing at half speed!
Thank you!
Quite apart from the always excellent content on a personal, um, note I appreciate your preserving this kind of thing - every one of those tracks will have been the result of a group of musicians hard work and creativity, along with that of studio engineers.
It would be a shame to discard the fruits of their labour that may exist nowhere else, especially as recordings take up no actual space these days.
Very evocative....of trudging around behind my parents in now long gone department stores, usually in the department with net curtains, plastic woven floor mats etc! Wedge shaped double sided speakers hanging off the ceiling on chains wafting the music overhead at an appropriate volume.
Only tangentially related to this video... Thank-you so much for resolving a 30-odd year mystery for me: It's "Ryan Paris - Dolce Vita". Amazing! Also, your outro is one of the best in the business IMO
You look pretty damn proficient at using Audacity to me...
That’ll mostly be down to the video editing.
@@Techmoan So you are also proficient in that! :-)
As far as I'm concerned, this is one of the best channels on RUclips. Whether it's checking out 100-year-old wax cylinders, reviewing dishwashers, sorting through 100+ minidisc players, or whatever the case may be, I know the content here will be humorous, well produced, and interesting. Thank you, sir!
For years, I used the cart machine at a radio station to play my show disclaimer every episode. When the station finally went digital, they mothballed the machine--but I kept my old disclaimer cart as a souvenir. I share your fancy for damnable old technologies, and the cart machine certainly fits that theme.
Your persistence and tenacity is inspiring.
Another great video!
As I was born in 1988, I've never really got to use tape recordings other than some Disney's VHS lol.
But I have to say that watching you playing around with all those amazing cassette and reel-to-reel players kinda hooked me up to audio tape recordings.
Thanks for what you do and for putting that much into it!
Cheers, Yoann
Matt's videos are so well produced, he really is top tier youtube, absolute legend.
Agreed! Love watching them. He is fascinating and so precise. I can only dream of being like that :)
Absolutely brilliant, always a pleasure to accompany you on these journeys. Also, I looked up what you said about Audacity, what a shame!
In a very real (reel?) way you're an archivist so that alone makes what you do worthwhile. Thanks for another great video.
I recovered several VHS camcorder recordings from the mould using demake-up cotton discs embedded with isoprophyl alchool, slicing then by the widht of the tape, placing them at the two sides of the tape, closing carefully the VHS tape protection on top of it and putting the cassete inside a VHS rewinder.
The tape might have been moldy and jammed up in the cartridge, but given its age, I'm impressed that it hadn't gone all sticky.
I suspect the carbon backing helped out.
This was mesmerizing. Your step by step process was really enjoyable to watch and seriously the work you did in audacity would have been impossible at the time these were recorded :) particularly how quickly it was done. Amazing how audacity works. Thank you Mat!
i would have never thought of putting it on a reel to reel, genius
as a history lover, especially towards anything and everything "mundane", i appreciate when people keep these old records alive and restore them as best as they can. It a way to remember what life was back in the day.
It might seem useless waste of time for some, but not for me personally
I agree. When I'm listening to original tapes or records on the original equipment, I'm listening to history. If a tape or a record is beat up, it only means it has a story. Maybe a little daughter of the record owner scratched the record. Maybe that muffled 8-track sat in a hot car for years and has traveled 100k miles. I find that more interesting than "hey Google, play music".
@@erwintimmerman6466 I have an old vinyl copy of Sgt Pepper (the label on it indicates it was pressed between 1969-1972, so not a first pressing but still quite old) that has a lot of minor surface-level scratches around the edges. I like to imagine that the original owner was someone with really long nails lol
Just want to share a funny story... i live in the usa, so your new videos come out at like 5/6am for me. The sound and your voice have trained me to go to bed because your videos are the last ones i watch before i go to sleep for the night
That clip of Mint Condition's "Pretty Brown Eyes" indicates 90s. Wow. Wouldn't have thought this would have been in existence that late.
I think you used the audio software absolutely fantastic you could teach me a lot in fact you do teach me a lot and I appreciate you and watch your content every time it comes out you're awesome dude
Also all the deal about Audacity being crap now is mostly limited to _now_ specifically, using an older version solves all problems and I don't even know if there's any advantage between versions a few years old.
@@Kalvinjj honestly, it didn’t look much different from the versions I used heavily circa 2009-2012! I’d certainly not be inclined to install every single update Just Cos.
Absolutely love the back and forth with those reels!
For me, any recovery or repair video is a draw. Thanks Mat, really enjoyed that.
That was a LOT of work, I'm impressed by your tenacity. I was also surprised by the quality of the audio that was played in those tiny clips, considering all that had happened to the tape and who knows how many times it was played when it was a current item.
I like to call it historic preservation, something so very few people are interested in these days. Someone went to a lot of trouble to produce those titles and you respect them by preserving them in your own way. I really commend you for it and I hope it would encourage others to do the same. I have old cassettes I would love to copy over to my PC before the worst happens to them. I bought new belts for my old twin deck, it plays beautifully and I will be 'backing up' the tapes in due course. Thank you for your inspiration :)
I know you can buy digital versions of 99% of my tapes but it's not the same. The dynamics are not the same, the listening experience is not the same. It's easy to hit 'Play' with a mouse button and go off and do something else but it is an entirely different thing hitting play on a relay tape deck, hearing the clunk click and waiting for the track to start, first complete silence, then (depending on the tape/deck) that warm muffled noise before your music starts and watching the counter tick away and the VU dancing up and down... simply beautiful.
Great work. Although its a little bit MUFFLED. There's two reasons (both fixable)
- the handheld recorder will have an upper frequency limit of 20khz. Halving the speed means you halve the upper frequencies to 10khz. Everything higher is lost. Rerecording with a high res recorder capable of 40khz should fix this problem.
- The 90/3180uS IEC/NAB playback curve on your R2R doesn't match the tape which has a different curve to suit its slower playback speed. If I had to guess it you should be applying the cassette eq of 120/3180us. Only it should have been halved because the tape speed was doubled (60/1590us). You can apply an eq correction in audacity (the difference of what the deck applied vs what it SHOULD have applied) which is tedious to calculate but will yield near perfect results. Or you can just take an educated guess and boost the high frequencies by around 10-12db and start to apply them somewhere around 2-4khz and everything above. The lowest frequencies have the same problem but you can probably safely ignore this unless bass thump is overpowering. Most likely this music doesn't have much of that so it won't really matter.
Cutting off the higher frequencies may also happen in any sort of prior compression. Good for pointing that out! 👍
@Kent Teffeteller but at twice the speed as it was transferred there may be cut offs, I understand.
Interesting how much bass there is, but then, if you're running it at double speed, if the correct speed playback circuitry has the bottom end of the frequency curve drop off at 50Hz to cut mains hum, running it at double speed means you're recording down to 25Hz off the tape, or half whatever the previous low end cut-off was on the tape head and preamplifier circuitry was. As other commenters have pointed out, it of course doubles your highest frequency through the analogue path, so needs to be sampled at twice the maximum frequency reproducible by the player. Thank you for making your videos, they are a treat to look forward to :)
You could now quite readily put the tape back onto its own reel and have it available to run in its intended machine.
I have to deal with a lot of mouldy tapes. Video8 are particularly time consuming because the mould is stronger than the tape and will cause it to snap. I've built a de-moulding rig for this purpose.
That’s gross but cool 🤣
“Good luck content matching that one Yourube” - made me chuckle.
No excuses necessary, your films are fantastic and informative .
Ofcourse it is worth it. This is exactly what the hobby is for.
A hobby is just doing things for the sake of doing them.
It doesn't always have to make sense or be the easiest or most efficient way of doing things.
Presto is Italian for "quick tempo", it's used a lot in classical music to describe faster movements.
Facts Hercule, facts..
Goodness, I remember my dad playing around with reels like that, he had similar kit for fixing tape.
Been some 25 years now but I think I finally found the proper respect for that stuff.
That Nikita track - on every music on hold I ever had to endure when ringing some kind of call centre
1) Barbra Streisand - Woman in love
2) Elton John - Nikita
3) Its on tip of my tongue, but u can kill me, I cant remember
4) Dont know
5) Never heard of it
6) Bryan Adams - Everything I do (I do it for Robin Hood)
7) Love and understanding, but its not Cher
8) The (teenage mutant ninja) Turtles - Happy together
9) Very familiar
10) Little less familiar
3) Stevie Wonder - Part Time Lover
Well done on the Barbara Streisand one, I didn't get that but you're right. Can't get 4, 9 & 10. I keep thinking that #10 is something like Bucks Fizz or something, it's super poppy. Hope someone can help us.
@@NewFalconerRecords It's a cover from Ryan Paris biggest hit "Dolce Vita".
@@solojinglesradio1 Yes, I've seen a few people say that. I'm not familiar with the song myself. And #4 is 'I'm Doing Fine Now' by New York City (never heard that one) and #9 is 'Liberian Girl' by Michael Jackson (don't know that one either). Cheers!
Given that you have over 1.2 million subscribers, you don’t have to justify anything, it’s clearly working.
The WD-40 lid is the best bit. I laughed my tits off. Brilliant Matt.
Using Audacity that way is exactly what the software is made for! No need to apologize etc. :). But one idea I might add: Your recorder should be able to record both "left" and "right" channels into individual files as track 1 and track 2 or so, so the editing process in the software has a few mouse clicks less :).
For anybody curious about the "Audacity is spyware" aside, it's a ridiculous overreaction by some extremists in the open source community. The Audacity team introduced automatic updating and error reporting in the app, which got blown out of proportion as spyware. It's still one of the best (and safest) wave editors, and you should it if it does what you need.
Thanks for clearing that up. I've used Audacity for years and really like it. Think I'll keep using it, but I might stick with my pre-updating version for now.
This was the first time I heard of Audacity being used as Spyware, thanks for quelling any worries
Its crazy people like us that enjoy watching what you are doing... Love it!
Your a genius with figuring out difficult audio puzzles!
Completetly off topic, as a young teenage something in the early 80's my mates dad gave us a Sony FM transmitter / DJ mixer, with line input, built in popup mic and telescopic aerial. It had a cross fade slide poteniometer so we could mix ourselves in and out of the music, We played around with it for a while tuning into each others show as we lived closeby, until someone told us we could go to jail, so my mate smashed it up, as the fear of a custodial sentence was to much for him to bear. I've since looked on the Internet for such a device from that era with no avail. I was wondering if anyone else had seen, heard or played with similar and wanted to remind myself of it purely for sentimental reasons as my mates dad sadly passed, and he instilled in me my love for everythng electronic. Any offers of a description or model number would be greatly recieved. Thank you for the time and effort that you put into making these short clips, they are greatly recieved and it's great to watch a conservator at work.
Another fantastic video I didn’t know I wanted to see! You actually save me a small fortune in playing with stuff I wish I had. Watching it is enough these days!
That was a “reely” interesting and entertaining program. Well in the “mold” of the rest of your work.
I thought you were going to just physically clean the mold off the tape -- I had no idea you would go through all this work. But I agree that it's definitely worth it to preserve that undoubtedly obscure and rare music. And I enjoyed watching you do it
I enjoyed. Thank you for your continued dedication to producing entertaining and enjoyable and informative (and calming) content!
i wish we could get this recording, cheesy 80’s covers are great especially in that quality
What an awesome job saving that cart, Mat! Please consider uploading those tracks to The Internet Archive (archive.org) along with the rest of the carts. Maybe at 24/95 if your recorder supports it as well. Some of us could even cut them up properly into files and identify them if you don’t have time. The Internet Archive will automatically make MP3s and put up a streaming player as long as you upload the high-resolution file.
24/95 might be a bit ambitious with that recording, as the initial 50% slowdown immediately dropped half of whatever sampling bit rate was used
As that would constitute publishing these works, are you also offering to indemnify him against any claims from the rights holders of the works?
@@CasinoWoyale While it's perfectly understandable if he doesn't want to upload these, there are plenty of still copywritten but 'abandoned' or ephemeral works on the Archive. The worst that would realistically happen is the rights holders file a takedown; no one is going to seek damages for this.
Why to upload to Internet Archive? Arent these songs available on internet?
Nothing I like better than watching cart videos.
When copying analog, higher speed allows for better quality, less hiss.
I'm thinking that if you slow speed by half in digital, wouldn't you be decreasing the bit rate? Decrease quality?
You have the magnetic thing that allows you to see the tracks. Using that would have shown you the end of a song...
Good job, Matt! As a veteran of complex tape editing from decades ago and sound editing today, I would have done a few things a little differently. First, there's no telling what mold scraping past mag heads would do to both the heads and the sound, so I would have tried to clean off as much mold as possible before passing anything thru the tape head path. There may be a safe solvent -- I don't know what chemical, but someone might know -- but even without a solvent, running the tape gently past a folded, soft, lintless fabric like disposable Webril Wipes wouldn't hurt the tape, but would take off some mold.
The standard tape EQ curve is not the same for different speeds, so you might want to experiment with adjusting the EQ in Audacity before producing a final signal to record. Using a spectrum analyzer might also be educational, since this tape must have passed the playback heads many, many times, and the heads might not have been demagnetized often (if ever). This would degrade the freq response, especially in the high end. This concern with EQ purity is only for the extremists!
Lastly, you could bypass the machine's head transport path for the rewinding, and threaded the tape directly from reel to reel. This would minimize any mag shedding and mold transfer. Again, probably only something a purist would care about!
Next, we'll tackle some old tapes that have gummed up from chemical changes...
Hi Matt, thanks for another superb vid. If you intend keeping the tape, unspool it, put it in a bowl of water and fairy liquid, shake it a bit then dry it thoroughly. The mould should then go. After all you don’t want any unnecessary mould in your house…yuk!
One of your best titles for a while. Nice.
I have one vinyl record of background music and its my favorite one! I agree with you totally.
as a fellow technological necromancer I quite enjoy these one's where you rescue stuff. Inspired me to do more :)
Went to press "like" just now and saw that I had done it already. Can't even remember when. Love your videos!
Definitely worth doing! A, you find out what's on the tape and B, it's fun and entertaining:) thank you as always
Thank you techmoan for making jet another guess the song game - and I think it is worth recording these covers ...
Enjoyed #9 MJ - Liberian Girl (or as I used to sing as a kid, “Librarian Girl”…..)
I thoroughly enjoyed this video and your resurrection attempts. I've had to perform the same type of audio recoveries on one-off cassette tapes which involved removing of cassette tape from the cartridges, replacing the tape into a re-usable cartridge, fast forwarding or rewinding the tape (carefully), removing the tape from the re-usable cartridge, baking the tape (where sticky tape syndrome is the issue) and then again replacing the tape in the re-usable cartridge for playback and transfer to digital format. At the end the tape and original cartridge were disposed of unless there were special logo's or printing on the cartridge that the client wanted for sentimental reasons. In one case they actually wanted new tape inserted into the original cartridge and the digital music transferred back to cassette for sentimental reasons. I use either ProTools or WaveLab for most of my digital recording and editing although I also use Capture (PreSonus) for remote recording work and then transfer the audio into either of my two main systems for the actual editing and processing operations.
Thanks Mat. Thanks for preserving history. I enjoyed the quiz.
Audio preservation 👍🏼. Well worth it as a hobby it looked like a bit of fun and was fun to watch. Thanks
Brilliant, seriously, the best youtube channel - the most professionally made and you're a natural. Every one is like a little adventure. One thing - those of us who grew up during the heyday of magnetic tape as the medium of choice will have it drilled into us not to handle the stuff - keep greasy fingerprints off it? Like the video flap said: 'do not touch the tape inside'. Did they lie to us, Mr T? Also, what happens if you splice using sellotape? Thanks once again for another great vid. I'm signing up to Patreon imminently.
It was definitely worth the effort, Mr Techmoan. After all, who else is storing this old music?
Just a tip to Techmoan when recording those songs in High Speed to Digital is to set the recorder to 88khz/24bit or higher so you can still have a perfect data when slowing it down, recording it at 44khz/16bit is just the same as recording in 30fps then slowing it down to 15fps, so doubling the sampling rate actually give you more data when slowing down the audio just like Slow-mo footage, I hope that helps in your future video restorations and preservation project.
I love it when you play the clips at the end, it's like playing an old school Heardle. I got 10 out of 10 so I am unduly pleased with myself.
That audio is delightfully lofi. Sounds pretty awesome on Koss's retro-style KPH40s.
I agree with the other comment(s) about having done the hard work.
Now, clean the tape after you remove the leader you spliced on, re-join as you said at the place you cut it, wind it back onto its original spool, oxide out and put back a new foil like an 8 Track repair, where it was and reassemble your now working cartridge.
If you didn’t waste any of the tape where the audio was, you have now restored it more or less. But you might want to clean the tape path on your reel to reel deck !
I really liked this video, in fact I felt like doing it too
Domani video su nastri lezzi e sudici?
I look forward to a new techmaon video every Saturday morning the same way I looked forward to saturday morning cartoons when I was a kid
Excellent video, I had so many thoughts while watching that I had to make notes not to forget them by the end:
1 - Makes you realize that mold is a much bigger challenge in endless-loop cartridges (8-track, 4-track, broadcast carts, etc.) than in open-reel or the various 2-spool cassette formats.
2 - putting the cart spool on the R2R, my first thought would be to try to tuck the inner end back in the inside, but I expect you tried that and couldn't. Then you brought out the WD40 lid with a hole drilled in it - absolutely brilliant, that would never have occurred to me.
3 - metal reels needing a spacer - here in the US, all the metal reels I've seen from the 80s on had an extra metal layer screwed on in the hub area to bring them to the same thickness as plastic reels. Some decks with wider reel turntables that were concave instead of flat required a spacer from the outside of the hub to the outside of the turntable, but if the turntable was flat, the metal reels were fully interchangeable with plastic reels. Very weird to me that the hub area of yours is thinner than a plastic reel, and isn't properly held by the deck's spindle.
4 - your youtube content match comment - I literally laughed out loud and clapped.
5 - Audacity being spyware? 1st I've heard that, but I certainly wouldn't be 'in the know'. I really hope not... I've never heard of any open-source software being spyware/malware.
It's only a recent thing with Audacity 3.0 and later--it was acquired by Muse Group who say in their Ts&Cs that they will collect limited personal information to "improve the app", and that this can both be sold and given to law enforcement. Obviously there's no user account or anything like that in Audacity so you'd assume what they can harvest is limited, but the fact they're doing it at all in what's nominally an open source application is what has people's backs up.
@@d2factotum Indeed, though I believe that in light of the outcry they've reversed the policy. Before then there were a couple of forks, but since the policy change those have been abandoned as unnecessary. If the people motivated enough to make a fork are satisfied with the about-face, that's good enough for me.
@@TheJamesM I hadn't heard that, thanks!
@@d2factotum Thanks for the info. I'll keep that in mind and check the status before whenever the next time is that I have occasion to use it. Severely disappointed that an open-source app would pull this crap, especially one as otherwise/previously excellent as Audacity.
@@d2factotum You appear to be trapped in the past. Specifically May 2021.
Have you read the privacy policy since then? It was updated to say "telemetry is strictly optional and disabled by default".
It's very easy to see if a program is phoning home, and no-one has found Audacity to be phoning home unless you allow it to.