What I've spent my morning finishing up, starting with the backstory:
In the early 1970s I had this "semi-pro" Sony Superscope audio cassette recorder with a decent external stereo microphone. In 1974 I took it along on a visit to Cincinnati, and recorded an entire Where's Charley? at my mom and dad's community theater (Terrace Park Players). My dad had some silly small part in it and my mom and I were in the audience.
Four decades later, my dad found the two cassettes and asked if they were mine or if I knew what the hell they were. I told him, and we popped them in and listened. The recording was surprisingly decent, but the kicker was hearing my mom, dead for two decades, laughing her ass off throughout the show. He was beside himself hearing that, and I brought the cassettes home to burn them to CD for him and I'd hang on to the originals.
The tapes still play beautifully and I decided it was time I learned to do this stuff reasonably well. I made full range WAV file transfers directly into my ZOOM digital recorder and created Audacity project files from those. I chopped out a few extraneous noises, added fade-ins and fade-outs, edited the whole thing to fit perfectly on two CDs without sacrificing quality, and burned them to disc using Windows Media Player which I've come to grips with just enough to accomplish that much.
So, on my upcoming visit, my dad's getting the CDs for his 91st birthday, along with a copy of the 1974 program with their names and their friends' names in it (how that ever survived there, I'll never know). And I'm REALLY delighted to be getting this audio stuff under my belt at long last.
