First, a request to any corporate lawyers settling down to read this article, particularly those on retainers from multinational recording companies: please avert your eyes until the last few paragraphs, where I will recommend a few folk-related Web sites. Better yet, skip straight to Sid’s column.
I wouldn’t mind betting that those of you still reading have boxes full of records you rarely play because you don’t want to take the balance of hiss and crackle so high you can no longer hear the music. Or perhaps cassettes you taped when Martin Simpson visited your local folk club – or when you sang in a singaround at Hastings that year.
I thought it might be useful to give you a few pointers to getting some of those records and tapes on to CD. I must get one thing straight. The 1988 Copyright, Design and Patent Act says it is illegal to make a copy of any work without the permission of the copyright owner unless it is for study, criticism or reporting purposes. Fortunately, the number of people who make copies for personal use – and for what I would suggest are legitimate purposes, such as being able to listen to a tape in the car where you probably do not have a CD player – is so high that this law is virtually unenforceable.
Don’t get me started on the legality of downloading through your ears – i.e. learning – the words and chords of a song, storing them in the hard drive of your mind and distributing them to the audience during a floor spot. Suffice to say that if anyone using information from this article bootlegs copyrighted material and sells it for personal gain I shall never speak to them again. So there!
Now where was I? I am assuming that you have a reasonably fast PC and a CD burner, because audio files do take up quite a lot of space. Right, that’s got rid of another half of my audience. First you need to hook up your cassette or record player to your computer. Make sure you do this while the PC is switched off – we don’t want tears. Chances are your PC’s line input will need a mini stereo jack, as would the output of for instance a personal stereo. If you are recording from a hi-fi system with a record deck, you will probably need a separate phono plug for each channel. If leads were not supplied, they only cost a few pounds from your local Tandy, if it hasn’t yet been turned into a mobile phone shop.
Next you need software to record with. The Sound Recorder that comes with Windows is limited to saving one minute at a time, so you need a program like WaveStudio, which comes with most Creative sound cards. There are also plenty of shareware programs available to download from the Web. Total Recorder only costs US$11.95 and is perfect for the job. CoolEdit 2000 costs quite a bit more at US$69, but allows you to clean up the recording, removing hiss and crackle – at least it does if you pay the extra $49 for the audio clean-up plug-in.
But if you are happy with the sound quality you have, then all you need is a program like CD’n’GO, which is freeware and will convert your .wav files into .mp3s. This basically chops them down to about a tenth of the size with surprisingly little loss of quality. It means you can only listen to them on PC rather than a domestic stereo system. But having stored the music on CD, there are plenty of free programs around at sites like The Free Site that will let you convert them back to .wav files so you can burn yourself a CD of favourites you can then play ordinarily. They take up less space than vinyl, are easier to select individual tracks from, and from this point on will not get damaged when you play them.
A few extra tips: It’s important to disable your screen saver during the recording process, particularly if it makes noises, because they may appear on your recording. Also, if you are saving as a .wav file to listen on a domestic hi-fi, you must make sure the “Save as type” box shows PCM compression, otherwise it will only play in a CD-Rom or DVD drive. MP3 files can only be played on such drives or on an MP3 player. These are becoming more popular as their prices come down, but they’ll never replace the old-fashioned CD player, which is of course what we said about the gramophone. Remember them?
By the way, for all those lawyers who ignored my opening comments and are right now cranking up their laptops, any opinions given in this article are mine and nothing to do with "Folk on Tap"!
While I’m having a bit of a hi-tech moment, I must tell you about the Transperformance/Klein guitar, which you can see on the Klein Guitar Web site. Steve Klein is a Californian luthier who has furnished the likes of Martin Simpson and Joni Mitchell with guitars. There is a picture of Martin on the Web site, reeling in horror at the Transperformance – the first self-tuning acoustic guitar. It is controlled “by an onboard computer, interfaced with a mounted keypad and LCD screen. A locking nut holds the strings while servo-motors retune the strings across a rolling bridge.” Good grief. It will set you back a mere US$9,400, so that’s enough of that.
Good to see that Martin has at lost got himself a real Web site. Unfortunately it is largely commercial, though there is enough material there to be worth a visit to read the biography, see the pictures and find out what he is up to. And the site promises MP3s and tabs in the future, which is a bit more like it.
If you want useful information about an obscure subject for free, look no further than Kevin Taylor’s "Morris Dancing" page. All it does is set you off in the right direction, but from here you have easy access to the "Morris Ring", "Open Morris" and the "Morris Federation", as well as Morris sites around the world. John Maher’s Morris Ring site in particular has complete listings of the Morris organisations’ combined memberships, as well as links to news, events and the "Morris Dance Discussion List".
Finally, to show just what can be done to make it worth visiting a Web site, the amazing Rory McLeod and the delightful Anna Ryder both have highly individual sites dedicated to them, where you can see pictures, catch up on news, find out where they are playing and generally have a good time.
Check them out from your prison cell, you pirates of the airwaves!