Why Not Digitize My Cassettes & Records at Home?

(by Craig Meyer, craig@reclaimmedia.com) (All Articles)

Cooking at home is cheaper than eating in restaurants. Mowing your own lawn is cheaper than paying a landscaper to do it.

So why not digitize your cassettes or records at home too?

A number of products are for sale as "solutions" to this very problem. They include USB tape decks, USB turntables and computer programs to use with the tape deck, turntable and sound card you already have.

What you might find surprising is that many of our customers are people who have already bought such equipment, but have given up on using it!

There are both qualitative and quantitative reasons why you're probably better off having us do this work instead. Find those that mean the most to you:

Sound Quality: Cassettes
Our tape decks are studio-quality Tascam 322's. We hand-clean their play heads every day and recalibrate them every week. It takes constant effort to keep our decks in tune, but we make a point of staying on top of that.

On the other hand, many store-bought tape decks come mis-calibrated from the factory, their high-end response muffled from day one. This especially goes for "consumer-grade" gear designed to be as cheap as humanly possible.

Sound Quality: Vinyl
Our vinyl turntables are speed-stable, vibration-isolated and use extremely-accurate (but delicate!) Denon DL-203 moving-coil needles. The brightness and accuracy of our vinyl factory is remarkable, and it didn't come cheap.

Furthermore, before playing every record we clean it to get the crackle-making dust and dirt out of the grooves. The audible difference that pre-play cleaning makes is remarkable and impossible to simulate with software.

And finally, once your vinyl is recorded into the computers, our digital click and pop filtering software is awesome. It takes out the "pops" from scratches on the record while leaving the music perfectly alone. I couldn't believe such accurate filtering was possible until I'd heard it myself.

Physical washing and digital click and pop filtering are included in every vinyl transfer we do.

Sound Quality: Analog to Digital
All new computers come with sound inputs but they're of surprisingly poor quality, as I found when starting this business. The specs say "16 bit" or "24 bit", but their distortion is disappointing. At the computer-chip level, sound inputs cost much more than outputs, so the computer companies keep them as cheap as possible. They're fine for voice chat, but not for recording.

So you'll need to buy and install a new sound card to get fidelity at all like ours, even if you keep your tape deck and turntable in great shape and they sound fine over your home stereo.

(By the way, every piece of hardware we use is listed on our technology page.)

Track-Splitting
As I discovered myself when starting this business, one of the biggest hassles of all is dividing a whole-side recording into tracks. Otherwise, you're stuck with just one long MP3 file or CD track and can't jump from song to song.

In fact, our most sophisticated custom software is for just this purpose, and even with it, track-splitting is still the workflow step that requires the most training and practice to do well. You'll have a harder time of it with pre-packaged software.

Data Entry
Typing in the artist, album and track names gets to be quite a hassle, too. At least here Lena's staff can concentrate just on that. The computers keep track of which tape or record is which, and how to label each CD or tag each MP3 accordingly.

At home, though, you're stuck slogging through this typing, sorting, copying and pasting business yourself.

CD Labeling
Our CDs come automatically typeset and computer-printed with their artist and album titles. CDs from LPs come with a track list too.

At home, though, you'll either have to design and print your own inkjet labels or just make do with Sharpie markers.

Album Art (LPs only)
Our digital camera rig is automatically tied in with our CD-printing and MP3-packing systems so that everything we make from an LP is tagged with a megapixel image of the LP sleeve itself. It's quite the trick!.

This is easy for us to do here, but a big hassle to figure out at home.

Time Cost
By now, I hope it's not a surprise to you that most people spend at least two hours, from start to finish, on every hour of audio they digitize at home. It's a lot of little steps to do the right way in the right order, and there's no hardware device or software program that does them all.

(Come to think of it, I suppose Reclaim Media is that device and program. We had to build it up ourselves, though, and it takes up a whole office!)

So! Get out your calculator, multiply the hours of audio you have by two (or three) and decide whether you have enough free time to do this at home.

And even if you do, what's your free time worth? Even if you'll settle for minimum wage (around $7/hour) then you're looking at a time cost of at least $21 to digitize a 90-minute cassette, or at least $11 for a 45-minute LP, all for a final product inferior to ours!

And if your free time is worth more than minimum wage--as I like to think for myself--then the time cost will be that much higher.

Why spend more for less?

Conclusion: Try Us First!
Reclaim Media exists and thrives as a company for very good reason. Our automation lets us spend just minutes of labor on every hour of audio we do. Otherwise, we'd never be able to handle our ever-increasing volume without raising prices and hiring an army of employees.

Not only are our costs lower, but we've engineering things so that our final product is better than what all but the wealthiest and most fanatic do-it-yourself'er with infinite free time can manage at home. I hope I've explained here why this is so, and if not I'd appreciate your letting me know (my email is craig@reclaimmedia.com).

You owe it to yourself to try us first. Just one or two cassettes or records are all you'll need. Place your order online, take them to the UPS Store for packing and shipping, and see what we can do. If you don't like our work then we'll just refund your money anyway.

Then you'll know. Then you can make a decision between sinking your money and life into trying this at home, or taking one more trip to the UPS Store (with the rest of your cassettes or records) and letting us take care of it.

--Craig Meyer, President and Founder, Reclaim Media.

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