Okay, that didn't take as long as I thought. I just kept feeding the deck new tapes during the work day, and now I am going through them at home.
It's a good thing I took some scratch notes as I encoded these files; the numbers got loused up and my notes have been helpful in putting them back together. These files take a while to decompress and compress for editing, so the first wave of trimming the silence away from the beginning and end may take a while.
22 files. Now the real work begins. I need to listen to them and cut them into usable tracks, adjust for volume and EQ, and add the ID3 tags. I'm keeping track of all the work in an Excel spreadsheet.
Interesting discovery: The last 3 tapes are clearly transferred from a reel-to-reel source tape. One clue is written on tape #1. But you can also hear it. One tape spins up to speed in a way that compact cassettes do not; another tape repeats about 30 seconds of the previous side--only possible if the tape was a copy of a previous recording.
One of these tapes broke today, and I had to pull it apart and splice it on my lunch hour. If these tapes had sat around for another 10 years, there might not be someone around who remembered how to do that!!!
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