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From Air to Bits

The Hound show was aired on WFMU, 91.1 FM, Saturdays from 3-6pm.

Over the years Hound tapes (airchecks) were collected from staff, friends and listeners. The formats varied from the crappiest 120 minute cassettes that had been recorded over a million times to pristine two hour DATs. Many of the cassettes were borrowed and dubbed to DATs or audio cassettes. A number of shows where recorded to 120 minute video tapes in SP Hi-Fi two shows per tape. Most of the tapes where recordings from radio. Sometimes the signal was okay. Sometimes it sucked. In any event, reception was usually better in mono. Some of the earlier tapes were recorded in the studio. There, the source was good but the quality of the equipment and diligence of the operators was sometimes spotty.

So... it begins mostly with hissy tapes of static-filled radio broadcasts of scratchy 45s.

You have a three hour show broken up onto three to six cassette sides with varying gap lengths when the tapes are flipped (assuming they are flipped at all). Take those cassettes with (hopefully only) gaps every 30, 45 or 60 minutes and dub them to 2 hour DATs. You get 2/3rds of a show on one DAT, then the last 1/3rd on the second DAT and the first 1/3rd of the next show. A third DAT holds the last 2/3rds of the second show. In some cases I dubbed to DAT at 32khz/12kbs to get 4 shows on 3 tapes. Now our original material with gaps at 45 minutes (most of the cassettes) are enhanced with gaps at the one hour and/or two hour mark.

Given a collection of roughly 500 tapes, from a wide variety of sources where a given show spans multiple tapes, that's been knocked around for 15 years or so, schlepped all over and repacked from one set of boxes to another a dozen times... you have a puzzle. And all the pieces aren't there. And if they're legibly labeled (fat chance) the author might not have written the right show date or sequence number on them. This is our source material.

The analog tapes were digitized over the course of 10 years or so at 44, 44.1 or 32khz stereo depending on my mood or if I remembered to set the parameters or if I remembered which settings I used last time.

The digitized tapes where first encoded into Ogg Vorbis format to maximize storage then decoded to AIFF as they were edited using Amadeus II to trim, split and splice the pieces into their separate shows. Recently discovered tapes went straight to AIFF. Then each show is marked in the editor to indicate sets and songs, split on the markers and encoded into mono mp3 - and as of 7/2005, variable bit rate stereo mp3 also.

The song titles and artists are gleaned from listening to the tapes. Sometimes the songs aren't announced, sometimes the part of the show where they were announced is missing and sometimes I just can't understand what's being announced. Regardless, in many cases I don't know how to spell what was said anyway. Mostly, I guess at the stuff that I can't figure. Sometimes I just punt and don't label the song. I'll make corrections as they come to light.

Update - I got my hands on some of The Hound's notebooks in January 2004. What I have covers 11/88 through 1/7/95 so I've been concentrating on publishing those shows. Having the notebooks makes things a lot easier - but there are still plenty of errors to be made. Sometimes I type things wrong on purpose because it's easier.

Enjoy,

        ber