Not satisfied with my vinyl adventures, I expanded my repertoire of obscure audio formats yesterday with the acquisition of a … cassette deck. I haven’t had one since my nonfunctional bookshelf stereo from college went to the curb, some time before I started to transfer all my media to digital, and I was worried that my cassette tapes would crumble to dust before I found something to transfer them.
Who cares? Well, I had a lot of audio that isn’t available in any other format, including Virginia Glee Club concert recordings (the 50th annual Christmas concert and A Dove in the Hall among them), a few rare Shannon Worrell and Monsoon EPs, and others. The Shannon Worrell stuff is just for me (though I missed the ability to hear her song with the late Haines Fullerton, “Lighthouse”), but the Glee Club stuff was for posterity.
And then someone posted on the local Arlington email list that they had a cassette deck that they were giving away–literally leaving on the curb. It turned out to be a very nice Teac W-520R dual deck unit that had no issues in playback. Twenty minutes later it was hooked up in the basement, audio out going into my trusty Griffin iMic and then into the MacBook, recording the 1992 concert recording that the Glee Club did at Smith–complete with the Benjamin Broening “When David Heard”, the James Erb “Shenandoah” arrangement, and … “Time Piece.”
Now I have to figure out what the right way is to make the Glee Club recordings available to other alumni and friends. But this should be a fun challenge.