Project description
Our family audio archive has been sitting in a closet for about thirty years and it is time to rescue it. There are 34 open-reel tapes — mostly quarter-track, recorded at 9.5 and 4.76 cm per second, a couple at 19 — and 96 compact cassettes: ferric, a handful of chrome, several with no label at all. Everything on them is ours: birthdays, my grandfather telling the same three stories every New Year, the school choir my mother sang in, ordinary evenings with a microphone standing on the kitchen table. I want to say this plainly, because it matters for the job: there are no commercial phonograms in the boxes, and I am not asking anyone to digitize published music for distribution. Only our own home recordings, for the family.
The tapes are in mixed shape. Two reels shed oxide the last time my father tried to play them, several smell faintly of vinegar, and a dozen cassettes have slack or twisted tape inside the shell. So I expect the work to begin with inspection and preparation rather than with pressing play: hand rewinding, drying or re-housing what needs it, splicing broken leader, and only then a transfer. I also expect the playback chain to be looked after between passes — heads and guides cleaned, heads demagnetized, azimuth checked on tapes made by different machines, and the right speed and track layout chosen for each reel instead of one setting applied to the whole pile.
What I need back is a lossless capture at 24 bit, plus a convenient working copy for listening in the car and on a phone. Noise reduction should be restrained: hiss and hum knocked down, but voices left alive — I would rather keep a little tape noise than have a relative sound like a robot. Then split the long passes into separate tracks and name them by dates and by people wherever the content or the lettering on the box tells you who is speaking. Deliver on two carriers with a checksum list, return every original in the order it arrived, and tell me honestly if a tape cannot be saved. I am counting on about ten days and I am happy to do the reels first and the cassettes as a second batch.
The tapes are in mixed shape. Two reels shed oxide the last time my father tried to play them, several smell faintly of vinegar, and a dozen cassettes have slack or twisted tape inside the shell. So I expect the work to begin with inspection and preparation rather than with pressing play: hand rewinding, drying or re-housing what needs it, splicing broken leader, and only then a transfer. I also expect the playback chain to be looked after between passes — heads and guides cleaned, heads demagnetized, azimuth checked on tapes made by different machines, and the right speed and track layout chosen for each reel instead of one setting applied to the whole pile.
What I need back is a lossless capture at 24 bit, plus a convenient working copy for listening in the car and on a phone. Noise reduction should be restrained: hiss and hum knocked down, but voices left alive — I would rather keep a little tape noise than have a relative sound like a robot. Then split the long passes into separate tracks and name them by dates and by people wherever the content or the lettering on the box tells you who is speaking. Deliver on two carriers with a checksum list, return every original in the order it arrived, and tell me honestly if a tape cannot be saved. I am counting on about ten days and I am happy to do the reels first and the cassettes as a second batch.
Photography Cash, Bank transfer
