It’s with much excitement that I’m posting two albums of The McKees’:

• Conversion Van
• The Go!Studio “Session”

Check them out on the sidebar of the page.

I recently got a good deal on a refurbished M-Audio Omnistudio USB and was also able to borrow an old 4-track cassette recorder. With this gear, I’m able to record all 4 tracks simultaneously from the 4-track cassette recorder, through my M-Audio device, and into my Powerbook G4. Once the tracks have been recorded to my laptop, I’m able to re-mix them and clean them up a bit.

I’ve got over 60 cassette tapes I need to digitize on my computer. It is a slow and tedious process, but one that I think will be worth it. These tapes include, among many things, practice recordings of PoSumOn – an old jam band I was in.

One issue I had to address before starting this digitization process was the fact that all of my 4-track cassette tapes were recorded at 9.5cm/sec (or double-speed), but the 4-track player I was able to borrow only played back at 4.8cm/sec (or single speed). Everything I played on the 4-track player sounded like it was all slow-mo! This wouldn’t do!

Using Audacity, a free, cross-platform sound editor, I was able to change the speed of the audio I recorded. So, I was able to record my tapes at single speed and then increase their speed by “100.0%”. This effectively “squashed” the recording to its original speed.

The end result sounds great. And I believe that recording at single-speed gives me a better sounding transfer due to the increased resolution of the tape (much like how a high-resolution scan will do multiple passes).

As I transfer and master the PoSumOn recording tapes, I will make sure to share them with you.

More to come from PoSumOn….