ndiamone
600 Club - QQ All-Star
These days, Torrent, Limewire and Azareus (Vuze) replaced passing cassettes out, and now blogs have surpassed filesharing.
What's the big hoopla all about? Whatever you can't Torrent or find on Limewire, somebody has a perfect copy of it on a blog somewhere to download for free and the RIAA or MPAA does nothing about it except go after some poor grandmother.
And people are saying even moreso on the blogs than filesharing, people have put up needle-drops of records nobody ever will CARE if they go to CD or not, so all these old forgotten recordings get exposed to a new generation.
We did no different in the 70's in college on tape than the kids do today on MP3's or blogs. The industry needs to get with it.
In our day, whoever was a `kept' guy (i.e. father had money) would go out and buy the newest release on reel to reel if he could get it that way, or LP or cassette, or we'd use the free copies from the college radio station which got everything from everybody, and which, being promo, usually sounded better than the store copies anyway.
We'd take the reel or cassette down to the language lab duplication center and make thousands of cassettes off the original reel or cassette. For LP-only releases, same thing. We'd take it to the LP-to-reel transfer stations and sit there for an hour while it recorded, then take the reel and replicate the above process. Kids would come by and pay whatever the going rate was for pre-loaded cassettes (usually under a dollar) and go home happy.
That went on for my freshman and sophomore year, then when I was a junior, our District Headquarters which we (District language lab) were in the basement of, got their own bulk-cassette loader, an unlimited account with cassette-shell parts manufacturers, a direct-to-plastic cassette printer, (eliminating the need for paper labels and kids to stick `em on the tapes), a recycled bin-loop duplicator leftover from American Stereotape and enough half-inch, quarter-inch and cassette tape pancakes to last for 50 years.
In the same building on the floor below us was the State Library for the Blind and next door to that was the studios for MARS (Michigan Audio Recording Service) for the Blind and Disabled (later known as Recording for the Blind). Since a lot of talking-book titles hadn't been remastered onto cassette yet by the real Library of Congress, and our 8 or 16 RPM LP editions were usually still mint, we'd sit there at night instead of drinking and carousing til all hours and tape off 6 or 8 turntables onto 3 or 4 tape decks all going at the same time.
Since all the sides on the old talking books were exactly 88 minutes long, we'd load up 90-minute reels and set every other turntable up to run counterclockwise, reverse the cartridges in them and tape the even sides backwards from the center out counterclockwise onto track 2 of tape decks at the same time that we'd tape odd sides forwards onto track 1 of the same deck, use that as a bin loop cassette master and then pass cassettes out to students.
So it wasn't any great big stretch from there to fit all the turntables with stereo cartridges, get two copies of each promo LP, play one side 2 backwards and one side 1 forwards on different turntables at the same time and tape them onto the studio's 4-track tape decks to use as bin-loop masters later.
And what do they come out with 25 years later for the club DJ field?
Turntables you can set to run backwards, and cartridge headshells set up to put a cartridge in backwards.
And down the hall from MARS was the Regional Headquarters and Studios for National Wireless Music (formerly National Wired Music, and later absorbed by MUZAK). We nicknamed it Jupiter Studios because everything in there was huge compared to what we were using. Those guys would be recording their 14-inch and 19-inch 8-hour and 16-hour background (and later foreground) music tapes onto their own engineered version of half-speed Sony ElCasets, using the same process, so that their huge reel-to-reels and machines didn't get worn out. Then they could make new ElCaset dubs whenever they wanted to from the production-service reels they got sent.
That practice is the main reason today why so many background music reels of the 50's 60's and 70's survive.
Years later, the subscription music services themselves went to between-the-speed cassettes (1-13/32 IPS or one-eighth of 11-1/4 the same as 1-7/8 is one-eighth of 15), and guess who they tapped to set up those labs? All these guys who used to get in trouble all the time for `misuse of corporate or Government property'. I still laugh about it.
Also, all kinds of engineers and engineer-wannabe's had SCA-capable radios in those days, and a few centers like ours would even use two simultaneous SCA channels, sometimes on two different FM stations to transmit SCA stereo to other broadcast centers that didn't have satellite downlink yet in those early days of satellite radio. The big New York and L.A. production houses would send out the raw music with no or very few commercials, all in discrete two channel wide band stereo, so whatever we missed doing ourselves, we could take off the bird, same as the radio stations would do and then make cassettes off that.
And we'd do the same from TV satellite subscription-TV feeds, (Spectrum, OnTV, SelecTV, etc) or 2-inch or 1-inch broadcast masters or LaserDisc or cable-station or whatever masters and have banks of VHS or Beta recorders going all the time in the basement.
And we were FAR from the only college doing it, same as today. Colleges all over the country were housed in the same buildings as their state libraries for the blind, and background-music transmission headquarters and trading off engineers the same as we were.
You never heard of anybody complaining about music-and-video sharing in those days, now all of a sudden it's a big deal.
Then, hot on the heels of all that going on was drugstore and bookstore cassette high-speed dubbers. Remember the old TELEX or ReZound machines every drugstore, bookstore and more than a few music stores had?
Then around the same time, there were still listening booths in record stores. Of course they had to have cassette recorders too, so for whatever new albums hadn't come on cassette yet, little kids would go into the audition booth one day and tape side 1 of the LP to a blank tape they bought 3 for a dollar, and then come back another day and do side 2, then take that to the drugstore or bookstore across the street and run copies onto some more 3 for a dollar cassettes and then sell `em to their friends for a dollar a tape. I know all kinds of boys who ditched their allowance and their chores in favor of this.
So, you ask, where did I go and get a job at after a college career like that? Yep. Getting paid for it in the U.S. Military doing satellite recording, LP mastering and videotape and audiotape duplication at Rhein-Main Air Base Broadcast and Transcription Center where we did the exact same thing for all the troops in Europe as I did in college, except the video-dupes were 3/4 inch U-Matic instead of VHS/Beta.
But of course, we ran our own VHS/Beta of the material too ``to do Quality Control at home'' instead of always having to be at the studio. That was even permitted, but we were supposed to bulk-erase the tapes after, though nobody ever did.
And where did I get my first job AFTER the military? Warner Special Products audio and video assembly house for those compilation CD's and videos. So I been getting paid by both the Government and commercial enterprise for years doing the exact same thing the RIAA and MPAA wants to hound some poor old grandmother over.
Please. People need to grow up and get a life.
What's the big hoopla all about? Whatever you can't Torrent or find on Limewire, somebody has a perfect copy of it on a blog somewhere to download for free and the RIAA or MPAA does nothing about it except go after some poor grandmother.
And people are saying even moreso on the blogs than filesharing, people have put up needle-drops of records nobody ever will CARE if they go to CD or not, so all these old forgotten recordings get exposed to a new generation.
We did no different in the 70's in college on tape than the kids do today on MP3's or blogs. The industry needs to get with it.
In our day, whoever was a `kept' guy (i.e. father had money) would go out and buy the newest release on reel to reel if he could get it that way, or LP or cassette, or we'd use the free copies from the college radio station which got everything from everybody, and which, being promo, usually sounded better than the store copies anyway.
We'd take the reel or cassette down to the language lab duplication center and make thousands of cassettes off the original reel or cassette. For LP-only releases, same thing. We'd take it to the LP-to-reel transfer stations and sit there for an hour while it recorded, then take the reel and replicate the above process. Kids would come by and pay whatever the going rate was for pre-loaded cassettes (usually under a dollar) and go home happy.
That went on for my freshman and sophomore year, then when I was a junior, our District Headquarters which we (District language lab) were in the basement of, got their own bulk-cassette loader, an unlimited account with cassette-shell parts manufacturers, a direct-to-plastic cassette printer, (eliminating the need for paper labels and kids to stick `em on the tapes), a recycled bin-loop duplicator leftover from American Stereotape and enough half-inch, quarter-inch and cassette tape pancakes to last for 50 years.
In the same building on the floor below us was the State Library for the Blind and next door to that was the studios for MARS (Michigan Audio Recording Service) for the Blind and Disabled (later known as Recording for the Blind). Since a lot of talking-book titles hadn't been remastered onto cassette yet by the real Library of Congress, and our 8 or 16 RPM LP editions were usually still mint, we'd sit there at night instead of drinking and carousing til all hours and tape off 6 or 8 turntables onto 3 or 4 tape decks all going at the same time.
Since all the sides on the old talking books were exactly 88 minutes long, we'd load up 90-minute reels and set every other turntable up to run counterclockwise, reverse the cartridges in them and tape the even sides backwards from the center out counterclockwise onto track 2 of tape decks at the same time that we'd tape odd sides forwards onto track 1 of the same deck, use that as a bin loop cassette master and then pass cassettes out to students.
So it wasn't any great big stretch from there to fit all the turntables with stereo cartridges, get two copies of each promo LP, play one side 2 backwards and one side 1 forwards on different turntables at the same time and tape them onto the studio's 4-track tape decks to use as bin-loop masters later.
And what do they come out with 25 years later for the club DJ field?
Turntables you can set to run backwards, and cartridge headshells set up to put a cartridge in backwards.
And down the hall from MARS was the Regional Headquarters and Studios for National Wireless Music (formerly National Wired Music, and later absorbed by MUZAK). We nicknamed it Jupiter Studios because everything in there was huge compared to what we were using. Those guys would be recording their 14-inch and 19-inch 8-hour and 16-hour background (and later foreground) music tapes onto their own engineered version of half-speed Sony ElCasets, using the same process, so that their huge reel-to-reels and machines didn't get worn out. Then they could make new ElCaset dubs whenever they wanted to from the production-service reels they got sent.
That practice is the main reason today why so many background music reels of the 50's 60's and 70's survive.
Years later, the subscription music services themselves went to between-the-speed cassettes (1-13/32 IPS or one-eighth of 11-1/4 the same as 1-7/8 is one-eighth of 15), and guess who they tapped to set up those labs? All these guys who used to get in trouble all the time for `misuse of corporate or Government property'. I still laugh about it.
Also, all kinds of engineers and engineer-wannabe's had SCA-capable radios in those days, and a few centers like ours would even use two simultaneous SCA channels, sometimes on two different FM stations to transmit SCA stereo to other broadcast centers that didn't have satellite downlink yet in those early days of satellite radio. The big New York and L.A. production houses would send out the raw music with no or very few commercials, all in discrete two channel wide band stereo, so whatever we missed doing ourselves, we could take off the bird, same as the radio stations would do and then make cassettes off that.
And we'd do the same from TV satellite subscription-TV feeds, (Spectrum, OnTV, SelecTV, etc) or 2-inch or 1-inch broadcast masters or LaserDisc or cable-station or whatever masters and have banks of VHS or Beta recorders going all the time in the basement.
And we were FAR from the only college doing it, same as today. Colleges all over the country were housed in the same buildings as their state libraries for the blind, and background-music transmission headquarters and trading off engineers the same as we were.
You never heard of anybody complaining about music-and-video sharing in those days, now all of a sudden it's a big deal.
Then, hot on the heels of all that going on was drugstore and bookstore cassette high-speed dubbers. Remember the old TELEX or ReZound machines every drugstore, bookstore and more than a few music stores had?
Then around the same time, there were still listening booths in record stores. Of course they had to have cassette recorders too, so for whatever new albums hadn't come on cassette yet, little kids would go into the audition booth one day and tape side 1 of the LP to a blank tape they bought 3 for a dollar, and then come back another day and do side 2, then take that to the drugstore or bookstore across the street and run copies onto some more 3 for a dollar cassettes and then sell `em to their friends for a dollar a tape. I know all kinds of boys who ditched their allowance and their chores in favor of this.
So, you ask, where did I go and get a job at after a college career like that? Yep. Getting paid for it in the U.S. Military doing satellite recording, LP mastering and videotape and audiotape duplication at Rhein-Main Air Base Broadcast and Transcription Center where we did the exact same thing for all the troops in Europe as I did in college, except the video-dupes were 3/4 inch U-Matic instead of VHS/Beta.
But of course, we ran our own VHS/Beta of the material too ``to do Quality Control at home'' instead of always having to be at the studio. That was even permitted, but we were supposed to bulk-erase the tapes after, though nobody ever did.
And where did I get my first job AFTER the military? Warner Special Products audio and video assembly house for those compilation CD's and videos. So I been getting paid by both the Government and commercial enterprise for years doing the exact same thing the RIAA and MPAA wants to hound some poor old grandmother over.
Please. People need to grow up and get a life.
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D), then I feel it's a different story.
