any interest in an early nineties cassette collection?

[thinkingthinkingthinking]

Progress report:

I listened to bits of a few of the tapes, and I am amazed and I have to admit a bit tearful and excited to find them in pretty much perfect condition. They are recorded in mono. Without extremely strong reception, the sound on FM in stereo was always marred by a pronounced "stereo hiss", so I avoided this by making almost all my recordings in mono. Each cassette has a complete track list, plus month and year. Dance tracks are marked with a little cross, and very fast dance tracks have two little crosses; I was into making dance compilations for parties! And I made a compilation of the very fastest dance tracks from the whole of 1992, or was it 1993? I think I've lost that compilation, sadly. Some cassettes have both Peel and Kershaw shows; cassettes are identified as in "JP Sept 92" OR "JP AK Aug Sept 92". Despite these helpful identifying notes, it is quite difficult to work out the sequence of sides. I used to record a side, and then put in another cassette. This avoided the problem of having to rewind to the beginning of the second side of a cassette. It means the shows are all almost complete, but creates something of a task to work out the sequence of sides. I hope it is mostly clear in the recordings when a show begins and ends, but I need to check this out more.

I note that you guys paid some bloke several hundred pounds for a collection of cassettes a while ago. Well, I'm not greedy but I am very poor! I am impressed that some of you are prepared to put so much time and effort into digitising the shows. Does it mean you are as crazy as I was when I made all those recordings? ;)

I hope that one day it will be possible to create a searchable index of all the shows, so that listeners can listen to shows from a particular date, find particular sessions or tracks, and even perhaps find quotes from Peel talking about particular subjects, etc. All this would obviously take a lot of work and expertise, and of course the main priority is to get the source material down in a durable, high-quality format before it turns into goo or dust.

Being occupied with poverty, career planning, education, etc., I may not have a lot of time to give on this project right now, but if it could involve the possibility to learn or help develop databases, etc. then I may be interested to help and perhaps also do some of the donkey work.

I guess I should say that I probably want to retain ownership of my cassettes (unless you want to make me an offer I can't refuse!), but I'm very happy to let one or two of you guys have them for the purposes of digitising, etc., and if you can store them in better conditions than me, then I'd be grateful for you to keep them until I get rich enough to afford a big house with a nice archive room! Or maybe they should go to a museum or other archive if they are worth keeping good.

I still haven't assessed the exact range of dates of my tapes. I'll do that very soon and let you know exactly what is there.

All the best

Steve

--- In peel@yahoogroups.com, rockerq@... wrote:
>
> > <<As you may have gathered I am organizing the ripping of the "400 Box" 
> > of late 70s / early 80s which we clubbed together & bought on Myspace>>
> > 
> Of course I meant eBay!
> 
> Cheers!
> 
> Rocker
> >
>