Westserve

Tape to Hard drive

I’ve started on an exceedingly tiresome task.
Over the years, I’ve collected probably 200 or so cassette tapes of talks, sermons and the like from a range of talented and gifted Bible teachers.

I’ve been fairly picky in what I have bought. Generally choosing on one or more of these criteria:

• Material that I found particularly helpful/inspiring/encouraging.
• Talks that I needed to listen to again to get the most from them.
• Speakers whom I was unlikely to hear again.
• Talks that I wanted to share with Rob or the boys.

But, with the passing of time, I longer have a cassette deck as part of my lounge room sound system, nor does my car have a tape deck.
So it was as good a time as any to start the process of converting some of these well-listened tapes to digital, and store them on my computer.

I prepared well:

• I upgraded the size of the hard drive that I use for data storage to allow for many Mb’s of audio files.
• I’ve started researching which 4-5Gb portable MP3/WMA/? player might be suitable to put on Christmas/birthday/Father’s Day lists, so I can benefit again from all this great bible teaching while walking or driving.
• I blew the dust of my high-quality, but frustrating to use Harmon-Kardon cassette deck.
• I grovelled and dug my way through the pile of dust bunnies (more like dust elephants) behind my PC, to connect the cable from the cassette deck to the right socket on the sound card.

Stuck the first tape in, fired up the sound editing software, and relisation sunk in: It was going to take 30-50 minutes for each talk to be digitally transcribed, and I was going to have to be there to flip the tape to side two for those longer talks.
Multipy that by 200 or so…

That’s why it’s such a tiresome task.
Shame someone doesn’t make a ‘fast copy to hard drive’ device, like the old fast copy cassette duplicators!

Ah well, I guess I get to listen to all those great talks again while copying!

But all this leads me to wonder how much great Bible teaching material is languishing in cupboards everywhere as cassette players become rarer…?