Question about way to speed tape digitization

[bunyabunya]

I am digitizing a large number of open reel tapes, from the early Fifties, and cassettes, some of which go back to ca. 1965 or so.

For the open reels I accidentally found I can cut the time in half by doing the whole tape at once, and then reversing the backward track in Sound Forge later on.

This is working well for the open reel tapes I started on, and am kind of planning ahead for the cassettes.

Would it work for them?

Someone on the Vegas forum suggested a Portastudio, is the Tascam 424MKIII 4-Track Cassette Portastudio overkill?

[MichaelM]

I guess it would work, you would need on of the portastudios with direct track outs to keep everything separate. The 424s have direct outs, don't know about any of the others....

Are they ordinary cassettes? The 424's use dbx noise reduction so I guess you would have to have that switched off, and the tape speed is faster. The 424s have a switch for that though....

[bunyabunya]

Great, thanks for the direct track outs hint. Going to take some cassettes into a store, and listen to them, use the direct approach.

[apl]

You could probably run the tape twice the normal speed, sample at 88.2kHz, and then trick the file to becoming a 44.1kHz, saving another 1/2 time.

[bunyabunya]

I am really new at this. Would that be the same as or maybe better than a pitch shift?

What I've done with the open reel stuff that was recorded at 15/16 ips, which is too slow for my machine, is to do a pitch shift, and it worked fine. They are all voice tapes, some even transferred from wire recordings in the 1940s.

[apl]

Hey, bb.

I don't know how to do it. A pitch shifter wouldn't work because one minute of original material would still be only thirty seconds.

Basically, the digital data of recording 2x tape speed and 2x sampling will be very close to what you'd get if you did 1x/1x. But the file will say it should be played back at 2x. There are some data-level programs like Matlab that could import-export and change the file header information, but I don't know about recording packages.

[bunyabunya]

Probably going to get one of the Tascam 4-track units on Friday, will be a lot of fun to experiment with it.

[bunyabunya]

Pitch shifting speeded up open reel tapes in Sound Forge worked. I played a voice tape that was recorded at 1 7/8 ips at 3.5 and 7 ips, and then pitch shifted both speeds back to normal, at -12 and -23 pitch shift. Not surprising to people who know about these things, but very satisfying for someone who has a lot of tapes to go thru.

[bunyabunya]

Tascam 424 just arrived, tested it out on a voice cassette at high speed, taking off the two different mono tracks to my computer at the same time, made a file, pitch shifted it in Sound Forge, and it worked fine, they sound great. So, one can copy a C120 in a half hour with this.