Dictabelt was there: Shoddy Goods 078
1Do you have any recordings from back when you were a kid? I’ve got an old cassette tape labeled “mom and son reading poems for Idelia” that I need to find a way to get a digital copy of, but that’s about it.
Of course, there’s probably 100 hours of my kid chattering away. I wonder what that’ll be like for people who grow up with that so available and replayable. If you’ve got kids, do you have tons of video of them?
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I have a bunch of video recordings of various things (including our kids when they were young). Unfortunately, they were made with our new (at the time) whiz-bang 8mm video camera. Now (25+ years later), the video cam still displays live video, but the tape transport does not work. And 8mm HW is pretty scarce.
So, no viewing the existing tapes or easily converting them to another format.
@macromeh Possibly a drive belt issue. Rubber degrades, and eventually, it won’t work anymore. That was a common issue with camcorders and VCRs back in the days.
@narfcake Maybe, but I don’t even hear the drive motor running.
(And also: F*ck Sony and their 90 day warranty on an almost $1K video camera!)
In one of my parents’ old boomboxes, there was an old How to Speak Spanish cassette tape.
Still works.
@Wollyhop lucky; most of my cassettes are just white noise now.
Though that may be because the cassette player (a Walkman) is unable to read them well.
“Now that I’ve retired”, converting-to-digital my old 8mm/super 8 and slide stock … and photo albums (inherited from my parents) is on my to-do list. So is either digitalizing or transferring off tape the countless VHS/mini VHS/DAT cassettes I have around here.
Ahhh, who am I trying to kid? I’ll probably just keep pissing away time here instead!
@chienfou I had my dad’s old 8mm video film transferred to other formats years ago. It’s fun to go back and watch occasionally.
Wish I could do the same with the 8mm video tape…
(Stupid f*cking flash-in-the-pan fad media format.)
@macromeh
Thankfully I still have the cameras/VCR players/tape adapters for mine so I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to patch them in and find software to make the conversion that much easier. My two biggest constraints are (1) inertia and (2) being resistant to spending money for things I “could” actually do myself, even if I don’t ever actually do them…
#cheapbastard
@chienfou
I often refer to myself as “Inertia’s Bitch”
@chienfou @therealjrn My favorite part of the transferred (film) videos shot by my dad is where each segment starts with a close-up view of Dad’s nose when he checks to see if the film is feeding properly. I guess it’s his version of the MGM roaring lion.
@chienfou @macromeh
@chienfou @macromeh
Inertia’s bitch - I need to use that more often
(More than all these VHS tapes need to become DVDs need to become ISO files on my … 24TB tape cartridge… I feel like I’m going in circles.)
Yes! I do! I have a cassette tape of me interviewing my dad for an assignment when I was in college. We were to ask about the great depression illustrating how, even to present day, the effects reverberate across decades.
My dad and his brother also used to send back and forth an audio tape with family news. Those were fun, we got to do sort of little radio plays.
I also have a collection of family 8mm films converted to VHS. I must convert them to digital some day!
@therealjrn
That’s awe-some. I love the concept of the audio tape going back and forth via mail. That would be a real treasure. Definitely needs to get converted to digital before the tape degrades to the point where you can’t anymore.
Damn it, did the edit before the bot triggered, or so I thought.
LEGOS! EGGOS! STRATEGO! AWESOME!
I know at one point there were super-8 movies of a few things I remember seeing them of myself when I grew older. One thing I remember was DisneyLand 1955 (I remember seeing the home movie, not being there, I was very teeny).
As for my offspring, nope, we never owned a video camera. When she was new we took tons of pics, by school age, not so much. I thing the only pic I have from her even on my phone is her wedding back in … 2017
I don’t have it but I do remember a tape of consequence from my childhood. I had a little Fisher Price cassette recorder and one day I took it down to my friend’s house. I remember that we hid under his bed with my tape recorder and recorded a tape of all the bad words we knew. We couldn’t have been older than 5.
Later I must have played it at home within earshot of my parents. I remember that I was introduced to the taste of Ivory soap that day when my mom literally washed my mouth out with soap for those dirty words.
Over this last winter break, I found a DVD between the pages of an old recipe book (think various foods suspended in gelatin). It contained digitized 8mm movies from about 1958 to 1976. My kids didn’t realize Super8s might be in color but had no sound. And my granddaughter got to see how wild her great-uncles behaved at family parties.
We have a couple 16mm reels of my father as a little boy in the '20s (I mean, the NINETEEN twenties) plus a couple weird humor reels from the same period. I remember watching them when I was a kid (we still have the projector) but I’m not sure the film is still watchable. And not a fire risk?
I have a cassette tape with a recording I made of a news report from Radio Moscow about the Chernoybl nuclear reactor disaster probably from a day or so after it happened. One of these days I have to find or borrow a cassette player so I can make an mp3 file from it. I don’t even remember what the USSR said about it…
@ItalianScallion I think it might have been something like: “Oh shitski!”
I enjoyed reading this article! So cool! That brings back a lot of memories. I was a paralegal in the 70’s and one day I remember my boss coming down the hall toward my desk, swinging his microphone, fuming! He had recorded a lot of his dictation (or so he thought) and when he played it back, there was not a sound! He was so mad you could see the steam coming out of his ears! So, needless to say, I had to resort to my shorthand again (shoddy as it was!)
@cottonpaw
/showme a cadre of secretaries attentivly taking shorthand dictation
@therealjrn Here’s the image you requested for “a cadre of secretaries attentivly taking shorthand dictation”
@mediocrebot Oh, that’s kind of sexist bot.
Those were the days eh?
@mediocrebot @therealjrn Looks like there is a set of triplets in the image! (Maybe even quadruplets if you count the blonde.)
@macromeh @mediocrebot Mmm, quadruplets…
We have some reel to reel tapes recorded on a Sony tape deck of me playing piano when I was a teen, my dad singing and some other stuff. My brother digitized the contents before the tape deck died.