Back to the Union Tapes

Two Tape Per Night

That's all I'm going to be able to do. This is rough stuff, even if you are just cutting tracks. The result is pretty cool, though. I just imported Tapes A and B into iTunes to add the ID3 tags and images. It's going to be very useful to people who want to hear them.

There re 9 more tapes. That's about 5 more days of this stuff. Looks like one set of these will be about 20 audio CDs and/or 2 CD-ROM discs. The CD-ROM discs can have my work papers, the spreadsheets, and all that kind of stuff on them. The audio CDs will need a printed track listing.

The files will be much more useful to scholars as mp3 files, I think.

There are some places where the reel-to-reel decks are very fast; I was able to slow down a track or two with Audacity, but I wonder if that would take too much time. I will wait until it's all broken into tracks to figure that out.

Going through and doing the tracks on these, it's interesting to hear my grandfather interact with people. I'm editing the Black Lake tapes, and these were made after the tragedy when Reuther was killed in 1970; Ken Robinson seems very aware that these tapes are permanent--he refers to them as "the oral history of our union." Brendan Sexton seems uncomfortable making the tape at one point. It's very interesting stuff. They are mostly talking about the construction and management of Black Lake.


Well, I heard back from the Reuther Archive. Not only do they NOT have these recordings, they are very excited to get them. So I am starting to break the timed master tracks into smaller segments tonight.

This will take a while.

Gonna use a slightly different syntax. A_1_001.mp3

This will preserve the original side information.

Update: It took 20 minutes to do the first side of the first tape. Not as long as I thought. I could do 3 per night at this rate.

Update: One hour later, and I am working on Tape B, Side 2. Only cursory track descriptions. This is going to take a while.