As part of the church ‘Time and Talents’ fund-raising drive, I got a request to transfer four cassette tapes to CD for a member of the congregation.
This inevitably doesn’t produce as good results as transferring LPs: you don’t have clicks to deal with, but there is background hiss that can’t be totally eradicated, and I find that any stretching is much more annoying when you hear it on a CD. There is also the problem of my tape deck sometimes stopping and winding forwards or backwards a little. Backwards winding just means making a cut when editing the result, forwards requires re-recording which usually works as the problem doesn’t always appear in exactly the same place, unlike LP clicks.
The tapes were of choral music, including the choir of St Alphege Greenwich (just before a friend of mine took over there), Bath Camerata, and a choir from Namibia which sang European and African repertoire. Two recordings were unseasonally Christmas ones; one had no printed liner so I had to identify pieces by their texts (Bath Camerata’s diction was good enough I could do this even for less well-known ones). The Greenwich recording showed how tastes have changed over the years in Christmas material. Walford Davies’ setting of O Little Town doesn’t get many outings these days which is a pity. On the other hand I don’t miss Macpherson’s The Shepherds’ Cradle Song (also on a Bath Camerata tape) – I remember a bass dropping out of a carol service because of it ‘I couldn’t face those lambkins!’ (Not a piece that would survive modernising ‘thou’ to ‘you’, either. Think about it.)