Having recently been staggered by the realisation that my first serious "pro" band broke up 20 years ago, I decided to dig into those dusty boxes in my storage space and see what I was up to 20 years ago. I was glad to find copies of both of our studio studio efforts and at least one dozen live show recordings. The bad news is that everything, live and studio exists only on cassette. (I also found a 1/4" two track of the last studio project,, but I am primarily interested in the live tapes.) Thes studio recordings got plenty of listening back when they were new, but many of the live tapes went straight into a box without every being listened to. (not uncommon among bands playing out constantly; who has time to listen to tapes of every gig when you are gigging frequently.)
So I thought I would select an hours worth of the best live cuts I could find and burn a CD to send to my far-flung former band-mates. If I wanted to make it easy on myself, I would have chosen one of a dozen or so later bands who's output is preserved on vinyl, two inch tape, DAT or CD. But these sort of nostalgia trips are usually restricted to our first real band, (similar to our first live-in GF, while we have a hard time remembering the name of more recent GFs.) So I'm stuck with a box of cassette tapes; some recorded by an old college friend who followed the band around like a one man fan club, taping shows up and down the east coast. Others are "off the board" tapes provided by the sound man in long forgotten clubs. The point being that the quality of these tapes will vary between pretty good and horrible.
Anybody have any suggestions for getting the best possible quality out of these old cassettes, without a full scale digital restoration effort? My main goal is to select the best cuts out of the dozens of hours of tapes and then just use CD Architect to neatly assemble the tracks into a CD. But there are a bunbh of plug-ins included with CDA, that I've never used and was wondering if anyone out there knows if any of them would be useful for this sort of project? Otherwise, I'll just do a decent job of selecting, editing and level matching; prior to burning the CD. Any suggestions?
