We often receive enquiries about audio and video tape that is not in the best condition having been stored in humid conditions, suffering from binder hydrolysis (sticky shed) or not wound on it’s reel well but we were surprised when we received this tape recently.

It literally is a bag of tape! It is a cassette tape that had at some point become unspooled, probably when the cassette shell was opened for a repair. We can and did restore the tape by respooling and reshelling before playing on one of our Nakamichi dual capstan cassette decks.

This is a time consuming job though as thin tape twists, turns and crinkles up very easily needing careful tension, customised winding systems and protection from contaminants such as dust, grease, etc that could cause more damage to an already compromised recording.

As a result of this many of our analogue to digital tape transfers require the use of external storage, usually USB 2.0 portable hard drives, to supply the copied digital transfers back to the customer. Some drives supplied by customers have not been of great quality and not designed to be sent about in the post. One such drive we had recently, a Sony Vaio branded 2.5″ USB drive wouldn’t copy certain directories of important files with the Mac OS Finder or the Windows Explorer. While most of the drive copied this certain folder always resulted in a crashed computer!

Thanks to GNU/Linux we have a bit more power and information at our disposal about hard drives and IDE or USB interfaces. It’s always best practice to copy as much information from the drive or mirror it before attempting any other types of data recovery or file system repair. Using the standard dd

Not our normal type of post but the new HTC Desire Android smart phone has been so useful with it’s open source applications, fast speed and wifi that I couldn’t believe I’d just put the phone in my shirt pocket and leant over the toilet!

Panicking, I fished it out and messed about trying to shut it down, when I should have just whipped the back off and the battery out. I did manage to get the battery out pretty quickly but not before I’d seen the screen start to make weird colours and odd lines. The thought of buying a new phone at full price was too much so I pulled out a handy bottle of Isopropyl alcohol (IPA) we use for cleaning tape and video record and repro heads. This is 99% pure IPA, not cheaper ‘rubbing alcohol’ that is often 70% IPA with 30% water. You really don’t want to make your phone any worse!

When I’d calmed down a bit I checked the moisture pads that show if the phone’s had water contact. These had gone pink confirming the toilet dunking so no warranty repairs here! Having little to lose I removed the 4 small torx head screws and the two even smaller crossheads screws under the rear cover. Two of the Torx screws have ‘void’ stickers over them so again once you undo them you’ve lost your warranty!

Now the bottom cover over the USB connecter can come up as can the inner cover which will reveal the wifi / bluetooth aerials. I didn’t remove the screen but ‘carefully’ poured IPA all over the bits that smelt of wee!

99% pure IPA will evaporate very quickly but any residual moisture should go before you can think about putting the battery and other cards back in. Many online sources recommend uncooked rice to absorb moisture but purpose made desiccants are best. I used several silica gel sachets in a freezer bag with the disassembled phone and left this overnight.

Thankfully this all worked, the phone starts, the screen works it’s alive!

The key points when you have this kind of phone disaster are:

1. Get the phone out of the water / wee
2. Get the battery out as soon as possible
3. Remove all the SIM / memory cards
4. Shake or carefully pat dry as much liquid as you can
5. Any liquid contaminant that isn’t pure water and contains sugars or salts must be cleaned off
6. If you try IPA make sure it’s high purity 99% is best

Finally, we’re tape transfer specialists not phone repair specialists so I offer no guarantee with all this but it did work for me.

We’ve been honored recently to have won a large contract to help in the digital migration of an extensive educational video archive by the transfer from U-matic archive copies to uncompressed video files.

While the archive had been stored in an suitable environment and rarely if at all played, they had not survived well. The Sony branded tapes from the 1970′s and 1980′s all exhibited binder hydrolysis or sticky shed syndrome. We were still able to get good transfers though using our range of umatic machines, particularly the Sony BVU-950P and For-A Time Base Corrector.

DVD footage of the flytipper had been taken by a member of the public of flytipping activity but this DVD had other unrelated footage on that needed removal. The DVD was also damaged and needed slow, repeated reading to rip the MPEG stream successfully.

Using MPEGstreamclip it was then straightforward to trim the stream, resave and create a new DVD with just the necessary footage.

See the BBC news article with the video, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/bristol/8029183.stm