With that, I chose to work on the family history project I am working on with transferring the cassettes and reel to reel tapes to digital files. I found a small reel to reel player in my mom's stuff and remember it didn't work really well so we borrowed one last time we tried to transfer a few reels about ten years ago. I figured I could use the old small one to preview the smaller reels while cooking dinner etc.
It had some wires poking out of it so I figured my brother hot wired it so we could plug it in without the adapter or something. MY BAD! I put a plug on it and plugged it into my wall and the popping sound and sparks that shot out were quite scary. What scared me more was when the player started smoking. I thought I may have started a fire so I pulled apart the player and boy did I fry the components! Not my best choice of messing with electricity!
I tried to contact my electrician brother before doing it but he is in Mexico and didn't get back to me until way after I screwed it up. Darn! He got a good laugh at my stupidity on the plug thing. Oh well, live and learn.
I worked on my mom's tapes for about 10 hours today. I once again found some treasures. I was super excited when I found a song our family sang all growing up. All of the kids know all the words to the song and I am not sure why it was such a big song for our family but I think we just likes the chorus as the words were different.
It is "Cats in the Cradle" which we sang over and over through the years. It was fun to create a file of "Family Favorite Songs" today. I found a few more of our favorites while working.
One of my last cassettes for the night was a happy find. I found a cassette of my mother singing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" karaoke version when she visited Disney World in the 1980's. It was a bit dramatic "Midi" sounding which was a bummer but I was thrilled that my grandchildren can hear my mother singing them the song she sang to me every night before bed. We sang it at her funeral and if you don't know the story behind the song, check out my first post about it here. You can also type "rainbow" in the search box to read all the posts about it since as I see them everywhere now.
It is weird that one tape will have hours of things on it I need to copy and then I can go through three of nothing. I am happy that all don't have stuff on them or I would fill several computers with files. I keep very busy when I am working on this, I have one to four players going at a time. I can't do anything else while I am doing this or I mess up. I try to keep two computers recording at a time but it doesn't happen often as I have been breaking recorders about as fast as I can clean and find them. I have broken three cassette players and two reel-to-reel players. The problem is that the cassette players I am using weren't made for all the fast-forward and rewinding I am doing with them. I need to find a heavy duty cassette player and recorder and I wouldn't go through them so fast.
I had to clean the heads again today and was really shocked at how dirty they have gotten in just a week. I am using them constantly though so it is understandable. I am going to have to clean them a bit more often and demagnetize the heads more often. Today, my best reel-to-reel player was really fuzzy and just cleaning the heads made a huge difference.
I am glad to be getting some of them done. It is taking forever but at least I am on the path.... Have a BLESSED Day!
No comments:
Post a Comment