cassette warble

[misterehmuseseh]

I am very new to Audacity AND any kind of recording technology, but after scrolling through 9 of the 107 pages of topics I am assuming that either everyone knows there is no solution to my "problem" and therefore have never asked, OR no one else will have it. (Because no one else will be using something 15 years old!)

We have a cassette recording of my wife singing songs she composed and for the purpose of having them "on record" we used what was probably a cheap tape on a cheap tape recorder with a cheap mic. It is just her playing her guitar and singing.

Now in playing it back, (which we haven't done since 'storing' it way back when) it has what I would describe as a "warble", which seems to me indicates that the tape has been "stretched". Also I think that in places the guitar sounds "tinny". (The guitar is a Fender Villager 12 string accoustic, so it is not the guitar but the recording.)

Is there anything in Audacity that deals with these kinds of problems?

Poor health prevents my wife from re-recording, both as far as the singing and the playing of her guitar.
For posterity sake, we will go for even a poor quality download but if there are additional hints, I'll appreciate them. (In the simplist of terms...)

Can one use a small Cassio keyboard to play into Audacity for additional tracks?

[waxcylinder]

You have what is known as wow&flutter - see this wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow_(recording)

This will be extremely difficult (verging on the impossible) to correct with Audacity - somebody correct me if I am wrong in this assessment.

A frther dig in Wikipedia shows that there are apparently tools to deal with this, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow_and_fl ... correction - but these look as though they are professional use only.

UPDATE: an afterthought - it may be worth giving the mechanics of the tape player a clean. Clean the capstan and the pinch roller - you sometimes get a build-up of tape crud - use a cotton bud and maybe some neat alcohol (vodka diluted with distilled water is one possibility).
Also run the tape from end to end and back again with the fast forward / fast reverse at least once - this can help to to even out the tension in the spooled tape.

WC

[misterehmuseseh]

Thanks.
I appreciate the quick response. (Considering that I am [or was] 7 hours differnce here in "Cannuckland") Just knowing for sure that I am not "missing" something obvious is a help. I'll play around with which machine I do the cassette playback on, and what I use to feed it into Audacity.
I answered my own question about the Casio keyboard when I discovered it doesn't have any line out or earphone jacks etc. I suspect a simple mic suspended over the (built in) speakers would be "unpardonable" but I think I will consider the whole project an "experiment" or adventure. I hardly have anything to lose and if I gain anything it is all bonus. (Apart from hours spent doing trial and error.)
Thanks again.

[kozikowski]

If you know somebody clever with electronics, you can get them to open up the Casio case and "bring out" the speaker wires, maybe putting a DC blocking capacitor in there, so you don't damage anything. I was shocked even more than I thought I'd be when I plugged a large sound system into my cheap Yamaha keyboard. They use a standard chip set inside all the machines which means all those piano notes are in there and it's your job to get them out.

We ended up throwing out a great many cassette machines when all their rubber belts and friction pucks turned into sticky goo. Oddly enough the one machine that survived was a portable, hand-held Walkman and I've used that to transfer older tapes.

Tape (or disk) errors like wow and flutter are deadly because correction software works on one error at a time. Sound Too Fast is one error. Sound Too Slow is a different error. Sound that rapidly changes between errors is chaos. Not many programmers can intentionally program chaos.

Koz