Saturday, October 8, 2011

HELP! Identitfy These Songs!

Been going through the slow process of cleaning up my database of mp3s - you know, making sure each is correctly tagged with the right name, artist, year, album, track number, etc.  At present there are over 26,000 mp3s on my music drive, and I am one who enjoys putting the whole collection on shuffle and letting the music play!  But it drives me and my OCD nuts when even one of them turns up mislabelled or with certain info missing.  Some folks I know care little about that - I often wish I had that luxury.  No, I'm one who makes sure there is the right album art, all the tags are there and correct; hell, I use a nifty free program called MP3Gain to make sure every mp3 plays at the roughly the same volume!

Simultaneously, I am diligently digitizing boxes of analog cassette tapes.  I have an old TEAC tape deck hooked up to the computer and use TerraTec Sound Rescue to record and Audacity to edit and/or clean up the recordings and split them into individual tracks.  Sounds like a major process, I know, but I've got the system down now to a science, and can digitize about half a dozen cassettes in a day's time if I wish to.  It's been neat to dig up mixes that I haven't heard in years and breathe new life into them this way - and add them to the ever-growing music drive.

As you might imagine, I have always been pretty meticulous in labeling my cassettes, just as I am now in the era of digital music.  But I recently came across one tape where the original insert card was missing.  Excited for the mystery, I popped the tape in and went to work identifying its contents.  Turns out it was a tape of my friend Lara's radio show from college.

Most of what she played on this tape I was able to identify, either because I knew the song well already, or by typing a few lyrics into Google.  Better yet, there is a fantastic iPhone app I use called SoundHound which actually listens to a song and returns its title, artist, album, etc. - so long as it has that song in its huge database.

However, two songs remained unidentified, even after SoundHound took a stab at them.  As luck would have it, Lara and I are connected through Facebook (isn't everybody anymore?), so I sent a message off to her with the two songs attached and asked her if she could identify them for me.  She replied that she had instantly remembered both songs, but had not heard either in years and sadly could not remember what they were or who did them.

So, I turn to you, dear readers, hoping someone among you will recognize these tracks and be able to solve the mystery - what are the titles, and who are the artists?  Better still, on what albums can they be found?  I can  tell you that the recording dates from around 1988-89ish, and the songs would have been fairly current then.



mystery song #1




mystery song #2


If you can identify these songs, you will be doing me a huge favor - probably more so than you know.  It drives me freaking batty to have these unidentified tracks in my collection!  Please leave your answers in the comments section below, and thank you in advance for your help!


5 comments:

  1. It looks like song #2 might be by Scruffy the Cat. One of their other songs, "My Baby She's Allright" sounds *very* similar.

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  2. Jeff - you may be onto something there! A quick check of Scruffy the Cat's discography reveals a song called "Tiger Tiger" on their High Octane EP from 1986. That would be around the right time frame, and certainly the title would make sense.

    Can anyone confirm?

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  3. think it is scruffy that cat for checking the lyrics.

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  4. Where did you find lyrics, Janine? This could be the confirmation we need!

    OK folks, seems like we're well on the way with song #2 - what about the first one? Any clues?

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  5. UPDATE - CONFIRMATION MADE!

    Song #2 is indeed "Tiger Tiger" by Scruffy the Cat, verified by finding a blogshare of the record (http://teenagedogsintrouble.blogspot.com/2010/09/scruffy-cat-high-octane-revival.html) and listening to a snippet of the song.

    One down, one to go!

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