No, not that one (no disrespect to Native Americans intended); rather a small band from Swansea around in the late 1980s. That’s where I went to university and I was rather a fan and saw them numerous times live. I also have a tape they released privately which I’ve been unable to listen to for many years.
So I “resurrected” it, and this post is to document how it was done :-
- Obtain a tape player and connect it to your computer’s “Line In”. In my case an old Sony TC-TX515 (which is good enough for this purpose).
- Fire up Audacity
- Set the input device appropriately.
- Set the bit depth to 24 bits (the default of 32 can be problematic with some tools).
- Fire up gtk wave cleaner
- Detect clicks.
- Detect songs
- Use the song markers as a guideline for selecting tracks (in the bottom so you get both left and right channels) and saving each individual track as a WAV file.
- Convert each individually to a flac file :-
flac -o 01_track.flac 01_track.wav
- Add meta information :-
- Add replay gain (optional):
metaflac --add-replay-gain *.flac - Add individual tags:
metaflac --set-tag=TAG="Value to set" 01_track.flac. The tags set for each track were: TITLE, ALBUM, TRACKNUMBER, ARTIST, GENRE, and DATE.
- Add replay gain (optional):
The first side of the tape came out surprisingly well; the second not so much (which is why it is not included below) as it was a live recording from the Mandela Bar (every student had a Mandela Bar to visit in the 1980s).
I’m going to link to a ZIP file containing the tracks from the first side of the tape. The music remains copyrighted by the band :-
- Tony Brown
- Mark Holownia
- Richard Jouault
- Dusty Kennedy
- Steve Leatherdale
- Andrea McCulloch
- Tony Skiller
If any of those have objections to their music being distributed like this, please contact me.
As to the ZIP file, it’s available here.
And just for once an almost relevant picture …
