Advice - 75 Earls Court live recording

[brasshat]

Hi all. In 75 I went to see Zeppelin at Earls Court with my brother (I was 15 and he was 19). He managed to sneak in a small cassette recorder and recorded most of the concert. Recently I found the tapes and I have been digitising the music. The sound isn't too bad and you can clearly hear Roberts banter with the audience. I don't know much about tweaking the recordings etc but I assume others out there may be interested in hearing the results. Any suggestions folks?

[Geezer]

Great news. Are you going to post it to YouTube/Soundcloud?

Edited March 15, 2013 by Geezer

[brasshat]

Don't really know what to do with it yet. It was on 5 different sides of 3 tapes. I'm still in the process of sorting it all out at present. I'm just glad that the tapes survived for nearly 40 years in a box with a load of other stuff.

[Cookie0024]

This is really cool, thanks for posting.

[brasshat]

I thought I would try to clean up the sound a bit. I digitised the tapes using Audacity software. The trouble is that it takes up about 7 gb so far LOL

[ListenToThis]

Fantastic. Very kind of you to be willing to share. Private message me if I can be of any technical assistance.

Do you know what date you attended!

[brasshat]

Fantastic. Very kind of you to be willing to share. Private message me if I can be of any technical assistance.

Do you know what date you attended!

Can't remember the date, but it was one of the additional concerts. My brother sent off for tickets but was told the original 3 dates had sold out, however he was told about the 2 additional dates so managed to get in early with a request for 4 tickets :-)

[Glyn]

Good news that a new source has been found and archived! Regarding the file size, is it all one big file? Is it 16 or 24bit?

The date would be easy enough to place by comparing already available sources at a latter time.

[brasshat]

At the moment I have 5 files of assorted lengths. (My brother used 3 tapes and tried to change tapes/sides between the songs). To be honest Im not very techy, I copied the tapes using the standard settings in Audacity. There are loads of settings and preferences but I don't really know what they do lol. The quality settings are as follows:

Sampling

Default Sample Rate - 44100 Hz

Default Sample Format - 32-bit float

Real-Time Conversion

Sample Rate Converter - Medium Quality

Dither - None

High-quality Converter

Sample Rate Converter - Best Quality (Slowest)

Dither - Shaped

(none of the above means much to me I must admit)

My cassette player is pretty basic and I have used standard line-out jack to my computer line-in jack. I am sure better quality could be achieved with better equipment though.

Edited March 15, 2013 by brasshat

[Glyn]

The immense file size is because the files are currently 32 bit. That's not an issue at the moment, the last step in "mastering" would be to export the files as 16 bit, 44100 Hz wav files. That should cut the total size down to around 1.5gb (the average size of other Earls Court recordings).

Any issues while digitizing? Were the tapes squealing/squeaking, cassette head getting excessively dirty? And yes, quality could be probably be increased with an advanced deck, but no reason to abandon the current transfer you have.

[ledzepfilm]

How good is the recording quality?

[JTM]

Great news. Are you going to post it to YouTube/Soundcloud?

Fuck that compressed YouTube/Soundcloud shite. It needs to go out on a Lossless bootleg torrent site.

Edited March 15, 2013 by JTM

[brasshat]

How exciting for you!

After Sick Again, does Plant mention 'this unearthly monster'? If so, it's the first show (17th). The existing AUD sources of this, while perfectly ok, are the least-good of the three non-SBD EC recordings...so if yours can trump them, you could have something awesome there.

No mention of "unearthly monster". Plant mentions going through the various changes of their last 61/2 years "relationship" etc.

[brasshat]

Ok, just for a bit of fun, I have made a short mp3 clip of plant chatting between songs so people can get an idea of the sound. (it's 1.2Mb). Is there any way I can upload it to this site?

[brasshat]

How good is the recording quality?

How long is a piece of string? LOL. Put it like this, it was recorded on a small battery powered, mono Hitachi cassette recorder, with a hand held microphone. Nearly 40 years ago.

[Glyn]

I don't know if you can put it directly on here, or offer a download for it (it might be removed). You can put it on youtube however and link to it.

Edit:

Or upload it to soundcloud (easier) and link to it

Edited March 15, 2013 by publicenemy3

[brasshat]

Ok, so it's the 18th.

The existing, essentially complete AUD source is very good - the best AUD source of the Earl's Court shows - and is also in stereo. Even so, it has a few minor cuts & tape issues, so even if yours doesn't match up for sound quality, it could be a great patching source for the OCD brigade. Like me, lol.

Sorry to show my ignorance. Where can I get a copy of the actual concert? Would love to do a comparison. If I ave anything better it may encourage me to post it wen I finally sort it all out.

[thelema]

Anything new here?

[brasshat]

Hi. Sorry not done anything yet. My wife has health problems and it distracts me somewhat. I do intend to clean up the sound track eventually. I will post here when i have more to report.