I finally succumbed, as I knew I would. I bought a cassette deck on Saturday. Only cost me £50, stereo double decks (woah!), plugs into my new Amp, replaces a fairly crappy midi system. I also bought a gadget, a Magic Box of Tricks. Oh boy! It's what I have been crying out for a long time, something that converts cassettes into CDs just by plug-and-play into a PC. but then, I'm thinking, I have such a lovely cassette player, why would I want to convert them into CDs? I remind myself, posterity and flexibility. The analogue world has been overtaken by digital.
Remember back in the 50s some all knowing know nothing expert proclaimed that there would never be a need for more than six computers in the world. It's not so long ago that PCs were typewriters from which you could send emails. Where the internet was a wonderful place full of textual information with a few nice pictures interspersed (and pr0n, too). I am currently listening Beethoven's 5th Piano Concerto "Emperor". This tape is as old as Methuselah, bought from HMV in Nottingham at a time when most pre-recorded cassettes were at least £4.99. I started expanding my cassette collection just as CD players were launching themselves onto the mass market. One of my fellow students had one, but he was a sponsored post-graduate; everyone else was on cassettes, pre-recorded and recorded off their own and others' vinyl LP collection. CDs were never going to catch on; for a start you couldn't record onto them! Twenty years on, that's what I'm doing. It's a wonderful, dramatic piece of music. It may be on a scratchy hissy tape. Other than the fact that it's the first tape I picked out, I'm not sure that's there any benefit in digitally preserving it. It's not as though recordings of this work are hard to come by. I've never heard of the soloist, orchestra or conductor (for all I know it might be a forerunner of a Joyce Hatto fake). At the moment it's a .wav file. The first movement, that is. It's actually a silent wave file. Ah well, never mind, the man in the shop said it's a bit tricky to set up. I suspect it would be less tricky if the instructions were a bit more girl-friendly. I don't know what the ground connector on the L/R cable is for; I don't know why I have an RCA male to female; the manufacturers are uncertain as to whether there is a stereo miniplug male to male included. Process of elimination suggests I might. But what I do with them is anybody's guess....
Talking of which I acquired an entirely different set of gadget not so long ago, a very specifically girl-friendly one. Not the sort you'd want to ask your brother, Dad, son, male housemate or next door neighbour for help with, so it has a useful guide to installing the batteries...
- Slide off the back of the silver base in the direction of the arrow
- Push the negative end of a battery against the spring at the top of the rear battery compartment and push into place.
- Push the negative end of a battery against the spring on the left and push into place. Repeat for the right hand battery.
- Push the negative end of a battery against the last spring at the top and push into place.
- Position the cover so about 5mm extends beyond the end of the oh my god, I can't write that... and then push down and slide to click into place.
Hello, I learned how to insert batteries into a tranny radio when I was, like four. "Make sure that the non-sticky-out end is against the spring. Put lid back on." Duh!
