Not even a full Blu-ray data disc yet

I changed my mind and decided to capture music videotapes first, which is a blast. I’ve captured about a third of them – results so far at the end of this post – and I think they’ll total about 60GB by the time I’m done. That’s a little less than three Blu-ray data discs, which are 22GB each, to digitise forty or fifty videotapes.

I’m finding that most of the tapes I recorded have a bit of a greenish tint, but a 12-point boost in the capture software’s hue setting takes care of that perfectly:

I have a bunch of old cassette tapes I’d also like to digitise and then discard, mostly live recordings directly from soundboards at bluegrass festivals and such, none of which I’ve seen on the bootleg trading circuit. There’s a US$15 USB cassette deck – of course there is, right? – that’s only a little bigger than a tape, so that arrives from Amazon Prime on Sunday. The free Audacity analog-to-digital capture and editing software will make short work of those.

+—Austin City Limits
¦ 0904 The Whites, New Grass Revival 1983.mp4
¦ 1009 Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Steve Goodman 1983.mp4
¦ 1101 Nanci Griffith 1985.mp4
¦ 1108 Kate Wolf 1986.mp4
¦ 1208 Chet Atkins & Friends 1986.mp4
¦ 1301 The O’Kanes 1988.mp4
¦ 1308 Loudon Wainwright III 1988.mp4
¦ 1311 New Grass Revival 1988.mp4
¦ 1314 Leo Kottke 1988.mp4
¦ 1410 Robert Earl Keen, Jr. 1989.mp4
¦ 1607 Bluegrass Superstars 1991.mp4
¦ 1802 Leo Kottke 1993.mp4
¦ 1803 Riders in the Sky, Hot Rize 1993.mp4
¦ Austin City Limits Episode Guide.txt
¦
+—Nanci Griffith
¦ A Voice from the Heartland – VH1 1988.mp4
¦ Austin City Limits 1101 Mar 1985.mp4
¦ I Knew Love Music Video.mp4
¦ It’s a Hard Life Wherever You Go Music Video.mp4
¦ Lonesome Pine Specials 110 Nanci Griffith.mp4
¦ Nashville Now – Apr 1986.mp4
¦ Nashville Now – Dec 1989.mp4
¦ Nashville Now – Feb 1988.mp4
¦ New Country – Little Love Affairs (1988).mp4
¦ New Country – Lone Star State of Mind (Feb 1987).mp4
¦ New Country – Once in a Very Blue Moon (Jul 1985).mp4
¦ New Country – The Last of the True Believers (Apr 1986).mp4
¦ One Fair Summer Evening 1988.mp4
¦
+—Other
¦ Flecktones – Tonight Show 10-04-90.mp4
¦ Hot Rize with Red Knuckles and the Trailblazers Central Sun
¦   Video 1986.mp4
¦ Miscellaneous Music 1.jpg
¦ Miscellaneous Music 1.mp4
¦ Miscellaneous Music 2.jpg
¦ Miscellaneous Music 2.mp4
¦ Miscellaneous Music 3.jpg
¦ Miscellaneous Music 3.mp4
¦ Tony Trischka & Skyline Live in Japan 1983 Cover.jpg
¦ Tony Trischka & Skyline Live in Japan 1983 Set list.jpg
¦ Tony Trischka & Skyline Live in Japan 1983.mp4
¦
+—The Lonesome Pine Specials
106 Maura O’Connell and Guests.mp4
110 Nanci Griffith.mp4
111 Hot Rize with Red Knuckles and the Trailblazers.mp4
113 New Grass Revival.mp4
116 The Nashville Allstars with Peter Rowan.mp4
118 The O’Kanes.mp4
122 Bela Fleck with the Blair String Quartet and The Flecktones.mp4
125 Moloney, O’Connell & Keane.mp4
201 Mando Magnificat.mp4
204 Christine Lavin and the Rounder Records Allstar Bluegrass Band.mp4
210 Strength in Numbers.mp4
The Lonesome Pine Specials Episode Guide.txt

 

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2 thoughts on “Not even a full Blu-ray data disc yet

  1. foodandart says:

    Nice! I did the *humongous* dump of my CD disks last fall.. using every Mac in the house with a working optical drive – husband’s Macbook, my 2 old MacBook Pros the G4 photo-editing tower and my MacPro.. still it took me well over 15 hours. The consolidation of the 5 computer music libraries and integration on to a single USB3 terabyte drive took another 6 or so.. I have only 3 VHS tapes left and the old, lonely ProScan VCR and at some point will get on that and be done with the tape media.

    Now.. the bigger question I have, is what to do with the 1,000 plus vinyl LP’s left in the basement after the elderly shut-in who owned them passed 13 years ago.. (somewhere if I can find it, there’s a spreadsheet with the album titles, artist and label the records were released by.. if I can find it, I’ll post a link and if there’s anything you’re interested in.. it’s all the same to me, – the vinyl is the Final Frontier – I’ll rip any of the LPs for you..)

  2. lalmon says:

    Yeah, LPs are always the bugaboo. If you plan to split them into tracks and clean up the clicks and pops, which I always do, it’s going to take more time than any other conversion. I’ve captured probably a couple hundred of them with Audacity over the years. A fair percentage of the 900 or so LPs I’ve got in a large and strong solid pine bookcase were re-released digitally, but I don’t really have the time or the inclination for most of the rest.

    However, the hundred or so Sviatoslav Richter albums in there are another matter. I continue to digitise a few of those at a time every now and then. They’re mostly Melodiya and other import labels – fairly rare even when still in release – that I bought for extraordinarily low prices at the mind-boggling Tower Records Classical Annex on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, where I made time to stop during every trip to L.A. in the ’80s.

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