PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

On a old cassette tape I have the recording of my first song with my first band in the late eighties.
The recording features one of the first rehearsal of this song taken by a cheap mic plugged into one channel of a cheap four track cassette recorder (kind of Teczon if I remember good).
The quality of recording and performance is absolutely poor, but it has great emotional value to me. This song was never further recorded (nor played in public).

That recorder doesn't exist any longer afaik; I've still got the tape, but the recording speed is very different from the speed of a common stereo cassette deck: the Teczon was working faster (or, at least, his pitch was set high at the take), so the song is reproduced very slowly by consumer devices.

Obviously I sampled it and tried to tweak speed and pitch, but it didn't result an easy thing since these parameters are separate functions in the software I used.
To come to the point, I set the pitch to the tonality of the song, but I'm absolutely not sure about its speed.

Any advice about this?

how about trying high speed on an old 4 track? there are a lot of them around...

Best bet for sound, as suggested, is to get an old four track. As i remember they generally worked at twice normal speed - many also have pitch knobs to fine tune as well.

getting the correct speed in a waveeditor (like fx Audacity: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ which is free) should be pretty easy if you manipulate the speed of the recording in there. There is a function that affects both speed and pitch in the same was as if you controlled the speed of the "tape". That's the function you have to find/use.

Good luck
Thomas

Thx you all.
The song reminds me to one of the earlier dark ages of my life and I still really appreciate its music and lyrics (echoes of some current happenings reminded me to it). Considering though the whole quality of the thing and considering it's the only one song on that tape, I don't think I'll buy a 4 track for this job only, and I've no contacts which can provide me with such a device. So I'll try the software solutions you proposed, then let you know.

afaik the high quality mode of those tapes was simply double speed.
Record the file at 48khz and then play it back at 96khz should do the trick.

cheers, Tom

The sample rate of the wav file is 44.1 and I can't resample it right now cause my cassette deck went out of order. Playing it at 96 kHz it sounds ridiculously fast and high in pitch, so I thing either or the pitch knob was set at the minimum at the take, or anyway the Teczon wasn't turning twice speed. Played at 48 kHz it's still too slow.

Audacity have done the job though and I can't hear evident artifacts besides the ones from the original recording even due to the very bad conditions of the cassette tape, already at the record time. Probably it ain't a kind of process that causes artifacts at all since i suppose the sample rate only is involved...

Thx you all again.


I was absolutely not remembering the song was that fast, though