Rant #3,016: I Believe In Music

After a couple of days of Rants that were kind of heavy hitting, I promise to write about things the next two days that are as light as air … and I hope that you are interested and intrigued by them.
 
Today, I am going to talk about something that I have spoken about countless times at this Blog, and that is digitizing music … but I am going to take it from a different angle.
 
Normally, when I talk about this at the Blog, I am digitizing my records, which involves turning the music on my vinyl LPs and 45s into MP3s using my turntable, my computer and software that allows me to do this.
 
I have converted thousands and thousands of records doing this, and stored on my computer alone, I have converted more than 800 albums and over 800 singles—and that does not include the thousands more that I have stored away on an exterior hard drive—so when you add everything up, I have digitized roughly thousands of individual songs to the MP3 format, which I put on a thumb drive and plug into the car, where I listen to all of this stuff.
 
It is a fun hobby, and keeps my 10,000-or-so records as current as the latest streaming release from Taylor Swift.
 
Of course, I do this during any down time I have, which right now, I don’t have very much of, but certainly, during the pandemic—when I was searching for work and finding nothing—the digitizing of my records kept me going.
 
And during a very disturbing period in my life, it was one of the only fun things that I could do to keep me engaged and hopeful that something would turn up.
 
Now I want to take you to another angle of this hobby, and that is the digitizing of cassette tapes.
 
If you can digitize vinyl records, you can digitize just about any music format—I dare say that you can digitize 8-tracks too, of which I have none in my collection—but you can certainly digitize cassette tapes with the proper equipment.
 
With my records, it was pretty easy to find a turntable and the proper software to be able to digitize vinyl, but it was a little more difficult to find just the right cassette player designed for this exercise.
 
I have to tell you, I went through about six different cassette players, and if they ended up doing the job, they were so brittle that they ended up busting on me, forcing me to search for something else.
 
I tried all different types of these cassette players, both those that hooked up to your computer and those that acted independently from a computer, digitizing your cassette music onto a thumb drive that was stuck into the side of the player.
 
Sometimes the music would transfer over fine, other times, even if you started it yourself—in other words, you would push “record” when a song started, not relying on a program to do it—you would get about a second or two of the beginning of the song chopped off.
 
When I purchased a turntable to help me digitize my records, I could have gotten a real fancy unit that would have cost me hundreds of dollars, but I settled on an Ion branded turntable, which is so simple and easy to use that it became second nature almost immediately.
 
As for software, I originally used something called Audacity, which is a great program, but I literally had to sit there and divide up the tracks of an album myself, which is OK but a bit of a time waster.
 
I finally settled on something called EZ Vinyl Converter, and while it does make mistakes here and there, it does divide up the tracks from an album with what I would say is about 75 percent accuracy, which is very good for this type of thing.
 
And if a mistake is made, I can always go back and re-record the track manually, and it comes out great.
 
And it all comes out in the MP3 format, which is good enough for me—some audiophiles prefer other formats where they get a better depth of sound--but for me, I am listening to this through a Kia car sound system, so MP3s are perfect.
 
So that brings me back to the cassettes—what hardware do I use to get the process going?
 
The best one for me at least is another Ion product, which is a cassette player/recorder that does exactly the same thing as the turntable does.
 
You plug it into your computer, use the same software as you use for the vinyl—it does give you different prompts when you are digitizing a cassette—and then you let it rip!
 
And yes, sometimes the program doesn’t divide up the songs properly, so like with the vinyl, you just go back to the song and do it manually.
 
Being able to do this has opened up a new world for me, because it allows me to listen to cassettes from 30 or more years ago that I haven’t heard since I first purchased them.
 
Most of them come from purchases I made at the old Caldor department store, which was always running tremendous sales on pre-recorded cassettes to their dying day as a shopping entity. I would pick up things I wanted for my collection, mostly fill-in stuff that I could get for about one-quarter of the price there compared to buying it on CD elsewhere

I also got a lot of them when I was reviewing music releases--the music companies settled on the cassette format for reviewers, to prevent easy duplication of music--so I have a lot of interesting cassettes, probably about 150 or so—not including cassettes I made myself during that time period.
 
So, right now, digitizing my cassettes now that I have a decent unit to do this on, I am just as apt to be digitizing a cassette as I am a vinyl record.

And by the way, both my turntable and cassette player are out of print and not made anymore by Ion, but you can find these units on eBay, often brand new in their original packing materials.
 
Now, I just have to find the time to do this exercise, because right now, I am literally booked solid.