Today is a double-retro media day, liberating James Lee Burke from the ferrous oxide confines of audio cassette books to the cyberworld of digital media format. One MacBook is running Audacity to convert old audio cassette tapes. The other, transcribing CDs. Nothing went swimmingly. It’s complicated.
Imagine my surprise when I ordered four audiobooks on eBay, only to discover they were all on audio cassette tapes. TAPES! Ouch. I did not see that coming. But I was determined to listen to his books, so I had to reinvent the wheel, which meant hauling out an old 2010 MacBook, and borrowing a cassette recorder that had USB connectivity. Of course it wouldn’t work. Of course not. No instructions either. Made in China. You get the picture. Quality Google time, I found I needed Audacity too. OK, retro software. I haven’t used Audacity in 20 years. TG for open source software, it was still around. Many hat tricks under the bridge later, I got it to work, sort of—by using an auxiliary speaker.
I discovered that Bluetooth speakers won’t work with retro MacBooks or software. Workaround: a speaker wire. My kingdom for a freaking speaker wire. Housesitting’s a btch when you need doohickies.
Speakerwire scored, two days later. But the recording was too distorted when played through speakers. So I swapped the speaker for headphones and fiddled some more and got Audacity to recognize the USB connections from the audio cassette player. Voilá. The right stuff. The process made me reevaluate the aphorism, third time’s a charm. In my case, third time was pure luck. But the process sure wasn’t intuitive. Not exactly ProTools.
I’ve also learned how to transcribe and clean up audiotapes. I now know what the sound waves of an electronic fart looks like, or an electronic pop, and the difference between them and a terminal K or S, and plosive Ps, or the reader gasping for breath. I learned you can remove much of a word’s sound wave to eliminate distortion (a lot). And it still sounds like a word. Luckily only one tape needed doctoring. But time was not kind to the slide guitar intros, transitions, and exits. So I learned how to clean them up too. Thank you Carlos, sound guy for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, for letting me look over your shoulder in the recording studio so many years ago. Osmosis happens.
Also, I wanted to move New Iberia Blues to my music files so I could listen to it again later on my iPad vs my car CD player, as much of it is poetry. This man writes pure poetry on the slant. I about died when he described the sky or the bayou. I have to rewind and listen again. And again. And again. This man has a bad case of metaphor and he knows how to use it. A writer’s writer. And yes, I do get the obscure literary references embedded like Easter eggs throughout his stories. 
So I popped a CD into my MacBook, fired up iTunes. Nada. I hadn’t counted on my disk reader being wonky. I popped in another CD, nada. Since, I knew Toast worked on this old MacBook, I fired it up, and it triggered the DVD player to read the CD. Talk about going around the horn. By disk 10, I learned the trick, slam that mothersucker into the CD slot like a curve ball over home plate, top of the 9th, bases are loaded. And iTunes arrives all out of breath, wanting to know the score.
Why all the bother, you ask? Why not just buy a digital copy and use an iPad/Pod/Phone? Good question. Most of James Lee Burke’s work has not made it to digital format. And I have an old car with a CD player, no USB or auxiliary functions. The fake radio bluetooth workaround doesn’t work. So if I want to listen to James Lee Burke’s work, I need to go to extreme workarounds.
But I think I’ve met my match with Sunset Limited. I fixed one busted tape, rewinding and splicing it onto a new cassette holder, recorded it with only two bust-ups. TG for ScotchTape. But the final cassette rewound wrong and got tangled. Even I can’t fix this one. So close to the end too.
James Lee Burke is my new fictional love. Someone asked, what new habit will you take with you from your year + in isolation during the pandemic? Mine is audiobooks. And my new driving habit is to listen to audiobooks—something I formerly hated as I read so fast, audiobooks are sometimes ponderously slow. But that no longer matters when you are driving. You’re a captive audience. A good tale shortens the road. I’ve also discovered Libby.
Also, most libraries do not carry James Lee Burke’s work. You can get every single audiobook of John Grisham, Jonathan Kellerman, Lee Child, James Patterson—but good luck with James Lee Burke who, in my opinion, leaves those other crime fiction novelists in the dirt.
OK, so it took me four library cards to get complete audiobooks list of those popular authors, but it netted only a few James Lee Burke’s books. Hence this saga. If you don’t know about Libby, and you like audiobooks, you can download books from any library where you hold a card, and then you can listen to it on the device of your choice, whether iPad, the Internet, or Kindle, it’s a brilliant way to go.
There’s something satisfying about taking those old audiobooks on cassette tapes mouldering away, and recording them to digital format. Give them a new lease on life. I plan to donate my eBay James Lee Burke audio CDs to the library. If you’re a murder mystery crime novel aficionado, and you don’t know of James Lee Burke, you’re in for a real treat—especially if Will Patton is the reader. Check it out.
see Digitalizing old audio cassette tapes
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