Re: Apple II cassettes by Brutal Deluxe Software

["Michael J. Mahon" <mjmahon@aol.com>]

Toinet wrote:
> Dear All,
>
> An update to the project:
> - the scans are of poor-quality but done
> - all cassettes but Apple (ones and several others*) have been
> converted to a computerized-form (thanks to Audacity and Ciderpress)
>
> Find the first files here: http://www.brutal-deluxe.fr/projects/cassettes/cassette.po
>
> I am really surprised and pleased to see that the cassettes are in
> general good state and can be read easily. Nevertheless, some of them
> fail to be recognized by ciderpress after being "audacitized" in mono
> at 22 kHz- I use a double-deck cassette player linked to my Hi-Fi
> system with a jack ribbon from the jack sound output of the cassette
> player to the line input of my MacBook. When ciderpress does not
> recognize the WAV file, I use the Dolby noise reductions (B and C) of
> the cassette player but that still fails.
>
> Any ideas on other techniques to get them with Audacity and
> Ciderpress?

The most likely cause of failure is that the cassettes were recorded
with alignment not matching that of your playback deck.

If you just listen to the cassettes that don't work, do they sound
deficient in high frequencies relative to those that do?  If so, then
adjusting your deck's alignment (head gap azimuth relative to tape
motion vector) will probably allow them to be read correctly.

After you are done, you will want to realign the deck with a good
alignment tape, or perhaps with one of the cassette tapes that worked
without adjustment, for an approximate alignment.

The production of cassettes was often a "cottage industry", and
surprisingly often the alignment of the recorder was misadjusted.
Of course, the person recording them never knew, because they
verified them on the same deck!

-michael

NadaNet and AppleCrate II: parallel computing for Apple II computers!
Home page: http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon

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