DV Info Net - Centenarian Traditional Owner.

Very good Bob.

Years ago for the Australian Dept. of Aboriginal Affairs we used to produce the audio cassette copies for each tribes Aboriginal candidates election speech. Around the Alice Springs area in Central Australia there are 46 different dialects, sometimes with 2 or 3 candidates from each tribe.

What a job, each used to record his master cassette up there, the Dept would send the 46-80 tapes to us with a list of the required number of copies.
The audio quality was usually all over the place and would keep our mastering engineer busy for a couple of weeks editing and recording our high speed duplication 1/4 inch master tape.

Each of their election cassettes was about 15-25mins and mostly recorded in sections. Sometimes after a stop, the candidate would repeat himself for a few sentences.
Of course not knowing any of the 46 dialects, we had to listen carefully and you could hear an audible click when the tape was stopped. We learned to recognise when the guy repeated himself and edit it out. Sometimes a battery operated machine would run slow so we used vari-speed and an educated guess when we had the right speed for our master.

One time our mastering engineer called me to hear something in the studio. He played their tape, the candidate was in a reverberant community hall and while he delivered his election speech, a dog started barking outside.

The tape stopped then restarted, the dog was gone but after a minute it started barking again. The candidate lost his temper and we heard .. 'bloody dog!' then footsteps clumping over to an open window, then 'GET THAT DAMN DOG OUT OF HERE!' followed by footsteps back to the tape recorder, he continued in his Upper Roper River dialect.

With a grin our mastering engineer says to me, 'so you want me to take that out?' It was tempting to leave it in.

Cheers.