Thread by @textfiles

A little thread on the GDC tapes, and dealing with turning something into digital from analog.

I just put up another tape from GDC 1999. Paul Steed, "Optimizing 3-D Art: Less is Best".

archive.org/details/gdc-19…

If this was a small set, like a half-dozen or so, it'd be short work to get them though the digitization process and shove them up. But this is about 130 tapes, so you run into a problem - it's a very boring process. This means, unless you're compensated, you might fall off.

So instead, I try to come up with a process that is 1. Simple, 2. Not destructive to the original material, 3. Easily done in the time gaps of my life.

Combining these attributes means it can "just happen" over time, and the choices I make are not final.

Here, you'll see an opportunity for a lot of argument and finger pointing about what the "right" thing to do is, and clear lines of disagreement on the proper steps to take, with the usual neg-throwing that the "other" way is not just unfortunate, but literally destructive.

This is dull. Certainly if the process is destroying the originals, then there's some concern, but if someone did the work and only did it at 300dpi instead of 600 or 1200, they still did the work and we can get to the items to see them. And storing the originals away.

The GDC 1999 tapes are mono, voice only (with occasional music in background) and primarily a vehicle for words. They're also highly technical and currently not anywhere on the Internet, even at GDC. So I made several choices in that direction.

The tape deck is commodity, shoves out its output to mp3 files, and then I take them and edit those mp3s into the .WAVs you see in the archive. I also have a "fixed" version where I do noise reduction and add slight reverb.

While I'd like to go Cassette Deck of Great Quality through to top-notch sound-card, this setup allows me to have it saving out the files into a USB stick, and it stops making the file when the tape runs out. I do both sides.

The advantage of this workflow is that I now have simple instructions: If tape stops and it's label out, flip it over and start the next side. If it stops and it's no label, take it out and do the next one. This will be easy to have in the background across the week.

The actual cleanup has a few steps, and they're dreary to do, and after I upload, I have to do some finishing. Those will add up around 130 tapes, but that'll be a single day I blow on this in the future. So I know that's coming, but it'll just be one day, not hours on and off.

Anyway, that's my workflow for a pile of cassette tapes. There's different ones for scanning, for videotapes, for floppies. All of them follow this approach, and it's worked well for me. If you're despairing it's all pretty boring while doing this, you're not alone! It is!

But you always find surprises in the material that makes it all worth it.

That tape I linked at the beginning? That's Paul Steed. He was quite a character. He died at 48 in 2012. Now his voice is back again. For history, for his family, for everyone.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Steed