Recovering priceless audio and lost languages from old decaying tapes | Hacker News Reader

Recovering priceless audio and lost languages from old decaying tapes

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149 pointsPaulHoule20 comments

This is wonderful and important work. Are there audio restoration gurus who make their services available to the average person? I've found many "transfer your memories to DVD"-type places, but I haven't been able to find people/companies that specialize in doing the best-possible digitization of formats like Yamaha 4-track cassettes and Super VHS HiFi Stereo tapes. (I'll be doing the audio restoration part.)

[Edit: Oooh, I see that https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode now supports HiFi audio decoding! Sadly for me, this appears to require some light VHS deck hacking.]

I'd love to learn about this too.

I have some old family super-8 movies. There are film scanners that can scan them in, but none of them decode or even acknowledge the magnetic soundtrack.

I'm sure the track could be captured more optimally, but I think still the cheapest way would be to find an old Super8 projector with sound. Even if the bulb is broken, you can still get the sound out. Then scan in a regular digital film scanner as you mentioned and merge with the sound in post-processing.

It's really pretty simple. If you can find an electronics repair shop, they should be able to do it for like the lowest rate they have, but it's pretty simple to do yourself in an hour even if you never soldered before.

It sounds like you're familiar with the process, so thanks for the reassurance! It would be neat to be able to do this for friends and family.

Really wish this is a services available everywhere. We have broadcast, radio or recording studio who throw away all the old recording because they couldn't afford to keep it or turn it into digital for easier storage.

Try https://www.video99.co.uk/ if you're in the UK.

This page points at several useful info sources about problems and restoration methods: https://www.archives.gov/preservation/formats/audio-conditio...

Re-recording for preservation is a complex topic, depending on the state of the media and availability of well-maintained reproduction gear.

Generally, preserving audio for generations will require significant expense. If you could -press- optical disks, that'd be great, but -recording- on optical is still iffy. Analog is probably still the best choice to last decades.

E.G. What Is The Best Way To Store Materials? (Includes links to more information.) https://www.archives.gov/preservation/formats/audio-storage....

I have a very old reel-to-reel recording that is sitting in the original recorder that I know has voice of me from over 55 years ago, along with family that have long passed on.

I really want to get what's on that tape moved to something, but no idea where to find someone to do it.

I'm in Australia (Melbourne) and would be really interested in anyone that can help.

There's a handful of companies in Melbourne who offer digitising. I've never used any of them, but if you want to avoid posting your stuff to a digitisation service (there's a couple of those!), there definitely are local people who can help. If they can't do it, they'll be in the best position to know someone who can.

I'd also suggest asking librarians at the state library or the unis who could help you find someone if these don't pan out

https://www.videolab.com.au/

https://crystalmastering.com.au/music-mastering/audio-digiti...

https://fats.com.au/

Also priceless, in these times in particular, is hearing about people of good will doing their thing on behalf of humanity. Reading it brightened my day.

Such divisive sentiments. It's no wonder you got flagged.

Again. We need something that is either MiniDisc / UMD size. Or May be something slightly bigger than SD Card, that holds 1 - 2 TB minimum. And last 100 years with decent read speed. I wish SD Card could be that use case but i doubt NAND last that long.

I want something that last. Even NAS are not good at it.

Not MiniDisc sized, but there's M-DISC which can be had in Blu-ray capacities (~100GB). They're a different chemistry than the old organic dyes from CD-R days and should last a pretty long time under some reasonable conditions.

The loss of MiniDisc as a recording format is tragic, especially for archival purposes like this. If it had just been a little more popular, we might have serious amounts of magneto-optical storage now. Nigh-indestructible, doesn't degrade over time as long as it's kept below the Curie point, nearly infinitely rewriteable... I've literally never had a MiniDisc go bad, though keeping the players running in the future may be an issue.

Any tips for models that can restore speech quality on aged cassette recordings (often the higher frequencies are partially lost)? There's different approaches to noise reduction, and also audio super-resolution, but I didn't find anything geared towards old tapes specifically.

There's a piece of commercial software called Celemony Capstan. Might not be right for your application but it was designed explicitly for tape restoration.

Tape ages badly. It can get so flaky that if you unwind it fast the oxide sheds and then clings to the head. Heat demagnetises and also warps the substrate. And then there's print through where sound on the next wind (above and below) gets imprinted into the signal. Old tape wants reading with as few moving parts as possible. I went on a tour of the British Library where their archival engineers talked to us about advanced preservation. Unwind the tape very slow onto new precision reels. For desperate cases it can be re-coated (sprayed) to stabilise. Then the trick is to use a low or zero-contact head. There must be some good tape engineers around who would still do this for a price or love of a recording.

First thing I think of when hearing about cassette tapes and preservation are deadheads.

Well done guys, you have successfully invaded my mind.

As an 8-bit hobbyist, I have tons and tons of cassette tapes containing all kinds of wild and woolly things. Over the 40 years since I started this hobby I've collected commercial titles, as well as a large number of "personal archives" type cassettes from various owners/users.

This is often very rewarding and very, very fun to discover, buried deep in the middle of some tape, someones' first code projects.

Perhaps its a modified version of a BASIC game they've typed in, perhaps its some machine code that doesn't quite work, maybe its a missive typed to a long lost love using an ancient text editor nobody knows anything about, any more.

I have over 40 machines in my retro- collection, and have exhibited quite a few of them. In one case, 40,000+ visitors in Vienna were introduced to the Oric Atmos, ZX Spectrum, and Amstrad CPC6128, each outfitted with modern storage in the form of a USB drive where the floppy disk should be. On occasion I'd get some donations to my collection - a box of cassettes someone found in the attic, and no idea what to do with them.

I have a cassette player/recorder[1], in the style of the old 80's 'brick' design, which also has a USB port so that things can be recorded direct to .WAV files. This simple tool has been very effective in recovering stuff from cassette tape. Its kind of surprising how many folks still have boxes and boxes of cassettes out there, and no way to transfer things .. I've considered offering a service to do it and may set it up as a side gig, whenever I get my own retro computing museum officially started ..

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