I made mention that Freil Thrift was in two record albums with the Chapman family. The one Monique found on ebay, "Redeemed By The Crucified One"... I've been posting about for several days now. It came with 12 songs, 6 to a side. All of those have been digitized by now, and uploaded to Youtube.
The seller listed it as being in "Very Good Plus". At first, I questioned that. There was a long shallow smudge that seemed likely to cause playback problems. It took a day or so to gather the necessary equipment (record player, cables and converters) and re-familiarize myself with Audacity. Recording went perfectly. That smudge had no effect on playback. The songs digitized perfectly - audio levels great, no clicks worth worrying about. It went smoothly and took about an hour. I was thrilled with it.
The other album wasn't anywhere online to be found. I had resigned myself to a long patient wait, when my sister told me she had one. She called it "the green cover", and told me the one I have is the second one, while the green one is the first record Freil was ever in. She also allowed that I might be able to borrow it. So long as I returned it, because "it's as important as my Elvis gospel album!"
(If you know Karen, you'll know that is the highest level of praise.)
We were originally planning on her bringing it to Mom and Dad's for me. I was already planning to visit this weekend. At some point she realized she couldn't make it to the river (home is very close to the Satilla), so offered to meet up in Nahunta on my way home. I spent yesterday "at the river." On the way home, Karen and I met at the Gold House. It's Nahunta's historic diner, a wonderful place to go. Both for the memories, and the food. They make wonderful southern food. I love their fried chicken. They also make about the best liver around. And a great, thick burger and home-style fries.
This time around, we just had coffee, and sat and talked for a bit. Got home too tired to start digitizing the record right away. Got up early this morning, pulled the record out. Remember a few paragraphs ago, when I mentioned the "Very Good Plus" rating on the other album? How I questioned it, because of the almost-scratch? I take it back. It deserves that rating. When I looked at Karen's record, the rating would have been "Very Loved Plus." This is what happens to an album when it's a family favorite, and gets played over and over... for about 50 years.
As expected, playback wasn't perfect. It was surprisingly good, though. Only one spot completely skipped a word. And that was near the end of a song, so not as high-impact as it could have been. However. I like that word. It's dramatic, with a strong foreshadowing of bad news.
However, the album was full of clicks, and the volume was a lot lower than the other record. To be fair, that's probably due to the way the album was created. Audacity has a very versatile click remover. And for the most part, it did a great job. One or two spots I used custom settings, but most of the time default settings were fine. Audacity also has a pretty cool amplify effect. It calculates the highest safe level to raise volume to 0 db.
Click removal and the amplify effect fixed everything that could be fixed. Did a bit of manual cutting and silence generation at the start and end of the songs. Overall it went very well, but wound up taking three hours to get the best versions of all the songs.
Best of all, it ended (literally) on a great note - the final song on side 2 was an instrumental, and Freil got a couple of excellent segments featuring his piano playing. I'm thrilled at how well everything turned out. It's going to take some time to get them turned into video clips so they can be uploaded to YouTube. But it'll be absolutely worth it. All those songs will be permanently available at any time, without having to add more wear to our treasured records. And so many people who don't know the Singing Chapmans, and Freil's playing, will be able to hear and appreciate them.
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