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When I was a small boy Cassette tapes had become mainstream, but in our house we still had many Gramophone Discs and a player to play it. So I have had hours of entertainment listening to Illayaraja’s Tamil hit songs and BoneyM songs from the LP records. But in the 1990s the player broke down, the discs scratched and lost, leaving me only with the memory of them. I felt LP records carried in their music a bit of magic, it was fun to pick up the needle and place it gently on the record with care not to hurt it-just like a bee drinking honey from the flower we needed to take the music from the record.
All this came back to my mind when I read the article on Gramophone in one of March issues of Mint newspaper titled “The house of vinyl” by Shamik Bag. The article talked about how Gramophone is coming back to life as a nostalgic gadget and A.R.Rahman’s upcoming album will be the first LP in 13 years for India’s premier music house (Saregama). Reading this I decided to buy a Gramophone player for myself. Since I wanted to listen to LP records with ease, I went with a modern version of the Turntable (Model TT-29) brought from Europe to India by Saregama against antique versions. I ordered the player online from their website for about Rs.8000 and it got delivered in few days.
Getting the player and installing was easy, but I couldn’t play it as I had no discs to go with it. I couldn’t find a single Vinyl record from Saregama’s online store, tried in local music stores, Chennai’s Electronic Bazaar (Ritchie Street), Moore Market – no luck. Saw some Vinyl in the new Odyssey store in Express Avenue, but it turned out each of the few records costed Rs.2000 or so (One-Fourth of my player cost). Giving up I called my Uncle, luckily he had few records in his attic which he promptly sent to me (thanking me for vacating some space in his attic). Later I found there are some Vinyl records available in Flipkart.com – I have ordered Vande Mataram for Rs.767.
Now I am happily listening to the music from my new Gramophone – and it does sound just as good as I remembered, I love the hisses and the imperfections.
Part 1
If you are like me who grew up in 1980s, you will no-doubt have a huge collection of old Audio cassettes (Tapes) that contains your childhood favourties but now lying somewhere collecting dust. Today you should be lucky to be having a cassette player in working condition to play them. A decade back I started hunting for my favourite albums/movies and managed to buy most of them as Audio CDs or MP3 CDs, but I still long for digitising my old tapes so that I can listen to them where-ever I want. So few years back I bought an inexpensive cassette player which has a stereo speaker out (1/8" TRS Jack in USA or 3.5mm miniature EP Jack in India, which is the standard type used in your iPod, Computer speakers) . To record involved four steps:
- I connected the Speaker-out from the player to Line-In in my PC using a standard 3.5mm Stereo Audio Patch cable like the one shown below. The audio quality depends on the quality of the cable and the pins used, so buy the best looking one or a branded one that you can find in your local electronics store.
- Recording quality turned to be good, but to set the correct volume level in the player and Mic-level in PC was tricky. That part took me few hours to set it right, too high the volume in player then you can listen to the audio in your PC speakers but nothing gets recorded and too low the recorded song can’t be heard while played back.
- Setup Line-In as default "Recording Device" in Windows. This can be done in Windows Vista by Right-Clicking on the Speaker system tray icon (bottom-right before time) and selecting "Recording Devices". Then in the dialog (as shown below) that appears Right-Click and select "Set as Default Device". You might want to double-click on the Line-in Icon and adjust the audio-levels for fine-tuning. If everything is working well, then when you play something in your player you will see the bars on right-hand side of the Line-In row moving up and down.
- The software used to record took some experimentation as well but was easier. I settled down with using the free Windows Media Encoder to record the songs as WMA files and then converting songs that I needed in my iPhone alone to MP3 files using Nero WaveEditor. I was not comfortable with directly recording into Nero WaveEditor or the free Audacity equivalent. If you are using Windows Vista, you can also try the in-built Sound Recorder as well that now supports durations longer than 60 seconds but it doesn’t offer the level adjustment controls found in Windows Media Encoder.
That’s all it takes to record your tapes as WMA/MP3 files. You are now good to throw-away your cassettes.
Part 2
Part 2 of this story happened about six months back when during my trip to USA in June ’08 I had purchased a device to make the conversion easier. The device was ION Audio’s Tape2PC. I saw it online and ordered through Amazon for $130 or so. The device claimed to make it easier for converting the tapes to MP3 using bundled software and the USB connection (so no cable hunting). I presumed the software does auto rewinding to beginning of cassette, identifying each track automatically and auto-reverse once one side of the tape is over, so that we don’t need to baby-sit during the entire tape.
After I got back to India, I never found time (or the interest) to set up this device until last Sunday. That’s when I unwrapped the box, connected the cables and without a moment’s thought switched the Power-ON. I got the display lights for a second and the device went blank. That’s when it stuck me that the device was 110V and I connected to 220V (in India), and the power supply inside the device should have got burned . Next day I gave the device to my local Electronic Repair shop (Rajam Electronics, Station Road, West Mambalam, Chennai -33. Phone: 044-2474 0106) to fix it. They diligently worked on it, fixed it and gave it to me today. They charged me Rs.400 (USD  towards their service charge and for replacing the 110V transformer to 220V and few other components that got burned. I brought the device home and plugged in, Windows Vista promptly deducted the device as a USD Audio CODEC and it worked just fine. The burning episode was a blessing in disguise, now I don’t need to keep connecting every time a 220V-110V Step-Down adaptor.
The device turned out to be a slight-disappointment. The audio quality was great due to the USB interface, but the software functionality was limited. No Auto Track Identification, No Auto-Rewind, No Auto-Reverse – you need to baby sit throughout the cassette play time, no escape from that. The in-built software (EZ Tape Convertor) does make it easy to mark each tracks, tagging easier and moves automatically the completed tracks to iTunes. You can find a detailed product review of Tape2PC from UK’s PCAdvisor here – I suggest you read it before you decide to buy this device. My opinion is that if you don’t mind spending few minutes extra for each cassette and you don’t have that many cassettes then you can safe yourself some money by not buying this. Instead go with my alternate method suggested in Part-1 of this post.
As I have written in the past I like Irish Folk songs. So the other day while at Crosswords I saw & picked up the CD “Ireland – The greatest songs ever“. One song among the 12 songs in the album impressed me a lot and in the last few days I have listened to it several times.
The song was Four Pence a Day by Tola Custy & Cyril O’Donoghue. Surprisingly my 4 year old son has taken a liking to it and he demanded I play it twice today!.The song talks about the hard working conditions for Four Pence a day as salary.
You can sample the songs from this Amazon page. If you like Irish Folk Songs this is a good album but the price at Rs.395 is damn expensive. You may be able to buy the few good songs online for much cheaper price.
 Before I continue, let me say I am a novice to finding music online, so if there are more options than I list here, please leave a comment about them. I normally just buy CDs from shops and on coming home rip them immediately to my laptop. Then I burn MP3/WMA versions for listening in my car for personal hearing.
When it comes to genuinely buying Indian Music online (Tamil film and Carnatic Music in particular) there are few choices available. Most of the sites sell CDs and since they are in physical format their catalog is very limited. Even those whose catalog is sizable, the site design and the search features are pathetic. Most of them require you to browse their catalog page after page rather than a simple search box.
So no wonder last week I was not able to find what I wanted. I suddenly recollected the good numbers that A R Rahman has done in “DUET” movie. Accompanied by Kadri Gopalnath’s mesmerizing Saxophone music and brilliantly acted by “இளைய திலகம்” Prabhu, I believe this album to be one of all time bests of Rahman. I am certainly not impressed by Rahman’s recent works including Sivaji.
So I searched for “DUET” CD in various shopping sites including Rediff, Indiatimes, Fabmall and also in ChennaiOnline’s Tamil Songs database, I didn’t find it. Then I went to HamaraCD – where you can create your own audio CDs of your favourite songs. Unfortunately the site allows only Audio CD format so the number of songs are limited to about 13 and so no MP3 formats. And it costs Rs.300 including shipping.
Anyway’s, I went ahead and compiled DUET and some of the other what I consider best songs of Rahman into an album. Surprisingly I got the CD delivered in less than 3 days and the whole CD was neatly printed, customized and music quality was excellent. Great show!. I just wish they did their website a little better designed and intuitive.
I had a very similar experience last month as well, when I wanted to buy few India Music CDs and gift it to one of my American friend in USA. None of the sites ship to USA and those who do don’t have any choices. I thought I cracked this by finding and ordering a set in IndiaPlaza, but after few days they come back and asked me to fax my credit card number with the 3 Digit code for verification. Forget it, I called one of my colleagues in USA and asked him to buy it in local Indian Store and post it.
So much for legal music online!
(Image Courtesy: Amazon)
I don’t have formal learning in any music, nor understand the basic and intricacies of it (Ragas and so on) - but I enjoy listening to good (that I can relate to). I mostly listen to Classical Carnatic Music, Tamil Film Songs, Tamil Folk Songs & Instrumentals. I am definitely not into jarring loud music.
6 to 7 years back one of my good friends “Asokan P” introduced me to Chieftains (Irish Folk Songs), after one of his trips to USA. I immediately liked it and started buying 2 to 3 more of their CDs. In recent years Irish Folks Songs became very well known due to “Titanic” movie – it is the same music that the couple in Titanic dance for in the lower levels with the common men.
Today while going through my CD collections, I realized in the last 2 years I haven’t heard Chieftains. Following which, I have been hearing to it for last few hours and I still love their music just as much as I did few years back. Hence this blog post!
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