Many thanks to SWLing Post and Shortwave Radio Audio Archive contributor, Dan Greenall, for sharing the following guest post:
Preserving Radio History – Old Audio Cassettes
by Dan Greenall
A few years ago, during the Covid lockdowns, I rediscovered a box full of my old audio cassette tapes on the bottom shelf of a cupboard in the basement. These cassettes contained many vintage recordings I made between 1970 and 1999, including shortwave, AM, FM and even a bit of TV audio.
I suppose I was a bit lucky, but sometimes not so much.
The box was closed and had basically been in a dust free, climate controlled environment for the previous 22 years (1999-2021). Prior to that (1970-1999), the cassettes were subject to much use and reuse, often being left out (for convenience) unprotected, then being packed up and moved a few times to a new QTH, always within southern Ontario, Canada.
In the early 1970’s, and on a student’s budget, I even resorted to repurposing a couple of cheap demonstration music cassettes by placing a piece of scotch tape over the ends so I could record over the existing music. Inevitably, some “prize” recordings were accidently erased over the years when a cassette was needed urgently and one was thrown hastily into the recorder without a proper check.
Around 1983, I made a decent recording of Radio Mogadishu in Somalia on the out of band frequency of 6790 kHz, but it seems to have been corrupted from being left in the recorder and not discovered until it was too late. Unfortunately, the mistake occurred right over the moment of the actual station ID:
In spite of all of this, I need to feel fortunate that so many of my recordings actually survived for 30, 40 and even 50+ years in spite of my neglecting them for so long. A great deal of this material has since been sorted through and digitised, then saved on the Internet Archive in order to preserve this radio history. I have also regularly submitted some of these recordings to the Shortwave Radio Audio Archive.
Here is a link to my material on Archive.org, which I am constantly adding to. Most files have audio, however, some are “read only.”
Do you have any tips about digitizing old tapes? Do you have to wind & rewind before you play one & should that be done at a lower speed than the player normally uses?
Thanks for asking. Well, nothing too high-tech here. I have used use an old Sony Radio-CD-cassette player for most of my work. It used to be my father-in-law’s. Then I simply place my laptop right in front of it and use the sound recorder app. It is usually necessary to play with the volume control on the Sony to get a recording that is very close to what you hear directly when playing the cassette. For example, I have two similar recordings for the Windward Islands Broadcasting Service. The one entitled WIBS was a second attempt since the other seemed over modulated. This method is similar to when I made some of my earliest recordings by simply placing an open mike in front of the speaker of the receiver. I should mention that it may also be necessary to play around with the “Settings” for the sound recorder as well.
Thank you Dan! I spent some time this morning scrolling through the archive looking at the QSL cards and other paraphernalia and listening to the clips. I’ll definitely be digging back into this. I’m sure many great memories for you and others here. A great resource!
Marty
Wow, Dan, thanks for doing that!
Cheers, Jock