Recovering priceless audio and lost languages from old decaying tapes
11 comments
·February 22, 2025CharlesW
This is wonderful and important work. Are there audio restoration gurus who make their services available to the average person? I've found many "transfer your memories to DVD"-type places, but I haven't been able to find people/companies that specialize in doing the best-possible digitization of formats like Yamaha 4-track cassettes and Super VHS HiFi Stereo tapes. (I'll be doing the audio restoration part.)
[Edit: Oooh, I see that https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode now supports HiFi audio decoding! Sadly for me, this appears to require some light VHS deck hacking.]
m463
I'd love to learn about this too.
I have some old family super-8 movies. There are film scanners that can scan them in, but none of them decode or even acknowledge the magnetic soundtrack.
actionfromafar
I'm sure the track could be captured more optimally, but I think still the cheapest way would be to find an old Super8 projector with sound. Even if the bulb is broken, you can still get the sound out. Then scan in a regular digital film scanner as you mentioned and merge with the sound in post-processing.
actionfromafar
It's really pretty simple. If you can find an electronics repair shop, they should be able to do it for like the lowest rate they have, but it's pretty simple to do yourself in an hour even if you never soldered before.
CharlesW
It sounds like you're familiar with the process, so thanks for the reassurance! It would be neat to be able to do this for friends and family.
davidzweig
Any tips for models that can restore speech quality on aged cassette recordings (often the higher frequencies are partially lost)? There's different approaches to noise reduction, and also audio super-resolution, but I didn't find anything geared towards old tapes specifically.
daniel_reetz
There's a piece of commercial software called Celemony Capstan. Might not be right for your application but it was designed explicitly for tape restoration.
DFHippie
Also priceless, in these times in particular, is hearing about people of good will doing their thing on behalf of humanity. Reading it brightened my day.
SoftMachine
Such divisive sentiments. It's no wonder you got flagged.
yapyap
First thing I think of when hearing about cassette tapes and preservation are deadheads.
Well done guys, you have successfully invaded my mind.
Again. We need something that is either MiniDisc / UMD size. Or May be something slightly bigger than SD Card, that holds 1 - 2 TB minimum. And last 100 years with decent read speed. I wish SD Card could be that use case but i doubt NAND last that long.
I want something that last. Even NAS are not good at it.