When I was a kid, music was magical to me. How did they capture all those marvelous sounds? I found out about the wonders of multi-track recording early on and in the 70s, finally bought my first 4-track reel to reel. It was a Dokorder 7140, the small reel model that only did the lower speeds. I’ve read some mostly negative reviews of the Dokorder products, but mine worked great for many years.
And over those many years, I recorded the different bands I went through. Some recordings were for fun, some to try and create demos for the band to get work, and some for songwriting. And although the Dokorder is now long gone, I still have boxes of reel to reel legacy in the garage.
I was able to acquire from a buddy a Teac 3340 in serviceable condition recently and my goal has been to go through and digitize the old four-track tapes. The Teac needed some servicing to get it up to snuff, but it now works well with the exception of one recalcitrant VU meter.
(Side note) I’ve been given alot of advice from people who know these things, that old reel to reel tape can suffer from the ravages of time. There are certain things that can be done to restore or revitalize old tape. I will not be covering this here. I’m lucky enough that my old tape seems to be working fine.
The methods described here will also work well for converting a box of old cassettes to digital as well.
What you’ll need:
Your analog deck
Connectors from Radio Shack
Your PC or Mac
Audacity available here: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
The connection from the Teac to the PC is a simple stereo cord RCA jack to stereo mini plug.
Plug the cord into its respective devices:
Fire up Audacity, set the preferences to stereo input and check to make sure you have signal coming through.
Rewind (doesn’t that sound so retro) to the start of the tape.
Start record on Audacity.
Hit play on the tape deck.
Watch the waveform!
A technical problem for me was that, in this particular case, the tape was recorded at 3 3/4 inches per second. The Teac’s slowest speed is 7 1/2 inches per second. So I was getting a “chipmunk” recording. But no problem! After the file was finished, I selected the whole waveform and reset the “speed” from the Effect menu.
After you’ve played the entire tape into Audacity you should have a rather large file. Save as an Audacity project, which is a proprietary Audacity thing. Then add a label track to your audio file.
Set the cursor in the audio track at the start of each song and add a label on the label track.
When you’ve gone through the entire file and labelled all of the tunes, you can export the audio into separate files.
You can choose mp3, wav or ogg to export to and Audacity will slice up your file and export it.
It’s a little bit of work, but you can save old cassettes, reel to reels and vinyl this way for your computer listening pleasure!
I’ve been able to save numerous 4-track tapes of various recording sessions from over the years this way. I’ve been able to put them into Garageband and clean them up a bit, add vocals and more guitars, etc. It’s a blast to be able to work with these again…
cya later…
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