Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Eli, The Early Sessions


We found some cassette tapes of Eli, David, Linda, and Saul that we had made to send to Norm and Laura in California. The sound wasn't that great, and when I rewound tape one, I broke it.


Still, the interaction was great. Eli was singing and spelling (things he still does). So I decided to try to copy the tape to computer file and send it to him.

This involved fixing the tape. (Splicers are no longer for sale at Radio Shack.)
I needed to get some software to convert the tape to a file. Eli suggested Audacity for the Mac.
It took a while to find it, download the software, install it, and configure it to create a project. Saving the file to MP3 involves a LAME driver. I am not adept at Mac software, so after I downloaded the recommended driver install package, I couldn't figure out how to tell Audacity to use it. The file that I thought was the driver was greyed-out.

I could export to a WAV file, which was huge. I uploaded the WAV files to my zoo account at UVM. It took an hour and a half per tape, but I could work with PC software which is more familiar to me. I got dBpoweramp Music Converter to convert to MP3.

Then I sent the file to Eli for his birthday today. Listen - the first bit is just quiet: http://www.uvm.edu/~djacobow/images/music/eli_early_sessions.mp3

Happy Birthday, Eli.