Tag: faulty

If only I could travel back in time 20 years

I wish I had a time machine. there’s only one thing that’s starting to come to light now, and to be perfectly honest, I’m the only person who probably knows about it. As you know, I’m a music lover. I’m done with trawling the charity shops for good CDs though. Now I trawl the charity shops for obscure CDs.

You know the type. A local band, usually consisting of a few ex-school friends or work colleagues. They get together and form a band. They record some tracks, they burn a few copies, print out a lovely case, and even stick a fancy paper label on there using one of the many, many CD labelling kits around at the time. They give some to their mates, maybe give some away at gigs when they do something at their local pub.

They eventually drift apart, and the bands get forgotten about. These burned CDs occasionally end up in charity shops, and I happily hoover them up. I’ve found some absolute pearlers of songs amongst them, some of which I intend to go through and document here in the future.

Anyway, that’s a story for another post. What I’m writing about here is that a lot of these CDs are now sadly unplayable.

Remember a few lines above where I mentioned that the bands / individuals will stick labels on the disks to make them look nice? Well, it seems those lovely labels are robbing future listeners of the opportunity to hear their music.

I, thankfully, haven’t found too many examples of this over time, but I know I’m going to find more, and it means that some songs are lost forever. No matter how small a band is or however long they’ve lasted, if they liked their music enough to put it onto record it, put it on a CDR and distribute it to a few people, then it simply deserves to be listened to by future generations… or, me.

Anyway, this all came about several years ago. I found a CD in a charity shop. It was a home-burned one, meaning it was all inkjet printed. They say you can’t judge a book by its cover, but you can certainly do this with CDs. I wanted to hear this.

The CD had one of those Inkjet label maker things on it. They were in every staionery store throughought the land in the 2000s. I put the CD in, attempted to rip it, and “nothing”. Or rather, It did eventually rip, but my CD drive sounded like it was having a nervous breakdown, and must have took an hour. I attempted to play it, but the sound was completely garbled. If you loaded it into Audacity, you could see the shape of a song there, but zoom in and the whole thing resembled a square wave. I tried this particular disc on many CD players. It was able to recognise it as a CD (the table of contents is stored in a very small area, only a few bytes at the beginning of the disc) but playing any of the tracks was a complete failure.

This CD was by a band called “Beckett”, and for all I know, this could have been the only copy ever produced, and now it’s gone for good. There are plenty of bands out there with the same name, but none of them appear to have the same tracklisting as what this CD contained.

Anyway, Last Saturday, I was in a charity shop, and picked up this.

It’s called “What’s In A Box” by a band called “Serving Suggestion”, released in 2002. It was 99p, and factory sealed. Enough for me to take a punt on it. Fast forward 8 days, I rip the cellophane off. I hope the image above just shows how pristine this thing was. Also, note that there’s none of your inkjet muck here. The case was professionally designed and printed.

The actual design of the case is clever. The disk was printed like a pizza…

Lift the CD out, and the underside of the inlay had a greasy mark printed, where the CD sat. It actually gave me a giggle.

I slapped the CD in, expecting to be greeted with some South African early 2000s indie tunes. After a minute or so, I got nothing. I took the CD out and examined it. From the naked eye, it looks absolutely pristine, after never being played before…

Ignore the dust, my phone loves picking up stuff like that. After a quick wipe, there was nay a mark to be seen, but I couldn’t be arsed reuploading the photo.

I turned the disk over, and realised that yes, this bloody disk had a paper label. It wasn’t apparent at first, as this was a nicely presented CD, but the scientific method of trying to lift it with my nail proved once and for all at this was, indded a paper label…

And, if you view the data portion in just the right light, you can see the issue… the bit where the data is stored has taken on a leapord-skin appearance, and is no longer a uniform shade.

It’s especially prominent to the left of the image, with that leapord-skin blotching. You can see where the lighter data section clearly had dark blobs on it. I can only assume that, over time, the glue on the label has reacted with either the dye on the disk, or the foil layer, or a combination of both. It’s sort-of like a “modern day” equivalent of the CD Bronzing fiasco that happened in the late 80s / early 90s. I don’t expect for this post to actually resonate with anyone, but I know there will be millions of people out there that will have used these CD labels and have precious memories stored on CDRs. Maybe it’s time to download the data from them before they all rot.

EDIT: I did try this disc on another machine, with different software,in the vain hope it’ll make any difference. Unfortunately, it didn’t. I’ll probably end up just binning this CD, but all is not lost. I’ve scanned all of the artwork in, and there’s a Discogs entry for this particular disc, and the artwork isn;t very good, so I’ll replace mine with that one. the case will go on to replace a damaged case.

My new toy

What’s got 2 legs, drinks crap beer and spends far too much in charity shops?

Well, I doubt I even need to answer that question, for you know that idiot is me. When it comes to charity shop shopping, I have two rules, never buy anything over a fiver, and never buy anything electrical.

So, on Thursday, I bought a £6 tape recorder.

This isn’t just any tape recorder, it’s a 4-channel tape recorder. Something I’ve never seen before, but apparently, they were once a thing. And this one is in really good condition

For some time, I’ve been after something that can play tapes. I’ve been after one to hook up to my computer, as I still have a load of tapes from my childhood to go through, and convert. I’m sure I was an absolute scream when I was 9, but it’s things like the old radio clips I want to convert. I do have a USB one, but the sound quality is dubious at best. I wanted something a but more… sturdy.

On Thursday, after knocking back a bag of chips for my dinner, I sauntered back to work. and decided to check out the Alice House charity shop. I was on the mooch for CDs, after only picking up a small amount on my travels. Before I even got to see the rotating plastic demons, something caught the very corner of my good eye. It looked like a tape recorder. And, clearly it was! I took it over to the little seating area they have, and by the time I’d sat down, a complete stranger said “You’ve got a bargain there!”. Upon closer examination, the sticker shows that it had only been PAT tested the day before, so yeah, it looks like I was indeed the first one to pick up the bargain!

Now, despite the obvious difference of having more knobs than a Taiwanese brothel, I didn’t quite know what I had hold of. Turns out it wasn’t just any old tape recorder. This beauty has the rare ability to record an all four tracks of a cassette tape. For the uninitiated, cassettes tapes have four tracks on them, but you only ever hear two of them at a time, the left and right channel. You turn the tape over, and you hear the other two left and right channels. This particular recorder uses all 4 tracks on the tape at once. Back in the day, it was a simple and relatively easy way to get a multi-track setup for home recording.

Last night, I plugged it in to make sure it all worked. And it did! One slight problem was that it was playing all 4 tracks at once, meaning at Side A was being played forwards, and Side B was being played backwards. 4 channels, y’see… there must be a way to have it just play stereo, but time was getting on, and I demoted it to the cupboard. I had a feeling it might have stayed there for a while.

I was speaking to a lad at work who knows more about this type of stuff than I do, he said just change the pan and tilt controls, and set channels 1 and 2 to L/R. This was too obvious to work

My interest in the device was rekindled. I’d planned in my head how I was going to announce my new bargain to the world. I hadn’t knocked up a Youtube video for a while. My camera battery was charged AND I knew where all the bits of my tripod were. This was all falling into a place.

I even got home and shot the beginning of the video. There was also a truly hilarious joke that I was going to include that saw me plug the power adaptor in, I’d then turn the light off, and then edit it so it looked like it tripped the lights, followed by a truncated “OHHH, FUUUU.”, and then immediately cut to the close-up shot of the tape recorder all set up and working, followed with “Only joking!”

This is where karma kicked me right in the balls. I’d got it set up, camera positioned, aaaand, the power supply for it went south. The power light was flickering, and the output lights were jumping around. I was not amused. Turns out the bit of cable that goes into the power supply is intermittent. Looks like someone’s picked up the (relatively heavy and brick-like – you can see it in the bottom left of that screenshot) power supply by the cable, and stretched it to near breaking point. Could this be the reason why it looked so good? Was the previous owners’ attempt to use it thwarted by a small piece of cable? I will never know,

One thing I do know is that it’s working again, after fashioning a makeshift splint from a bit of masking tape and some cable ties. I’ll farthom out a more glamorous s

I’ve yet to hook it up properly to my computer to have a proper play around with it, but I’m eager to see if it sounds as good as it looks…