New music for old

I've decided to bite the bullet and start transferring my old music tapes to MP3.   It's going to be a long process, there are hundreds of the buggers and it's carried out in real time. Working 24 hours a day it would take well over a month to complete the task so I think I can safely call this a long-term project. At least I'll have an excuse for listening to some great music that I haven't played for years.

I used to love making compilation tapes. Somehow, the digital, computer-based alternative just isn't as much fun. But audio tape now accounts for under 4% of all music listening and soon it will be difficult to even buy a tape deck. Curry's, for one, are discontinuing them.

On a Mac there are several methods of re-recording available. There is GarageBand, of course and there are the two most popular audio capture apps -Audio Hijack (+Pro) and Wire Tap (+Pro), both very good - I use Wire Tap for most of my audio capture needs. But for this particular task I'm going to use Amadeus Pro ('the swiss army knife of sound editing') which is a fully featured multi-track editor with batch processing capabilities and an easy to use repair facility which does a brilliant job of removing tape hiss while maintaining crisp, clear sound quality.  (Tip: It's an analogue signal going in so it does pay to use a decent cable to connect your deck to your Mac). Fortunately I didn't stint on tape/recording quality and the original tapes still sound great.  Writing out the track notes is going to be a pain though :(

I also decided to get an additional hard drive (not so much for audio storage but for the increasing amount of video files - which can eat up space) and decided on a Western Digital 500GB from EBuyer. With a £10 Google Checkout discount and 4-5 day delivery it came in at just under £75 which I'm pretty sure is the cheapest decent 500GB external drive available in the UK.