Yesterday, after I posted about the day's happenings, Adam Podd and I got together and he showed me a few tricks for playing with sound from the GarageBand files I was creating. In a nutshell, I am using the AGPtEK Super USB Cassette Capture to input songs into GarageBand. From there, I am saving the files and then sharing them to my iTunes library as an .mp3 file. I started with a recording of my organ teacher, Dr. Claire Coci, performing a concert at West Point that I taped years ago (I didn't even write the date of the performance). Wow! She had passed away in a car crash in 1978, so to hear her playing again was such a joy! But I was listening to an old audiotape with lots of hissing noise when the organ passage got soft and then crackly when the passage was loud. I am not looking for a studio remastering! I just want the ability to hear those sounds again, and I want the ability to fix whatever I can.
Today I selected an audiotape to work with in order to try out some of the tricks that Adam showed me yesterday. One idea was to record the whole side of a tape on a single track and then divide songs later by setting up cycle regions. That was great (I thought)! I pressed "play" and let the tape roll while I did a few other things. Then I went back and located all the breaks in between songs. I also labeled each of these sections with the song titles. I saved the file as a ".band" file. Then I shared the file to my iTunes to create the .mp3. Uh-oh! It all converted over as one file. I guess there is no simple way to do this!
So the next step in this process is to cut the cycle regions, one at a time, and paste into new files and save each track separately. This is going to take some time! So maybe I will not make a dent in my suitcase of tapes for my independent project. So here is my new goal: Figure out HOW to do this so that when I want a song that is on a tape -- a song I use enough times that it would be worth going through the process -- I will know what to do!
There has been a lot of talk at this Summer Institute about blogging. Word is out that this is a good communication tool! I attended a demo about blogging with Noteflight from Tyson Valyou. I found this very interesting because in my blog research I had not come across a blog set up like this. Tyson designed this blog as a teaching tool geared directly toward his students. That will allow him to track their progress. He has lots of interesting items in there, including activity templates for his students to complete. Very cool!
Next I am looking forward to a session presented by Giuliana Sarullo on GarageBand for iPads...
I thought about copying my tapes by playing them in the tape deck and recording them into Garageband, then converting them to mp3s. Is using the AGPtEK faster? You're right - it's going to be quite a process!
ReplyDeleteAny way you slice it, Janelle, it's a process! What I like about the AGPtEK is that it is USB-direct into my computer and then I'm choosing GarageBand to do it's magic. I do not otherwise have a tape deck that has that USB capability.
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