TMNT_Coming Out Of Their Shells

NOTE: The files in this archive will be 24-Bit/48KHz (NOT CD-Format). You must alter them to put on CD. However, being that this is the highest quality version of this music available anywhere that I'm aware, I decided to keep them as such.

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Coming Out Of Their Shells album was never on CD as far as I know. It was a cassette tape available through Pizza Hut and other promotional channels to promote the COOTS Tour. The Ninja Turtles were very popular among children in the early 1990's, and after a successful movie, and animated series, along with countless toys for every kid, they finally got into the music business.

The particular tape which I used to make these files was played exactly ONE time: to produce these files. I purchased this tape on eBay where it was advertised as still being shrink-wrapped. Indeed it was, and the quality after more than 10 years was amazingly good. The equipment used is a JVC TD-W318 dual-cassette deck (upper-end consumer-grade) connected via RCA-to-minijack to a Voyetra Turtle Beach soundcard using Sonic Foundry (now Sony) Sound Forge v.6 in 24-bit 48KHz mode. Before capturing the audio on this cassette, I did a test-run to properly set levels lower than necessary so as to completely avoid any potential distortion (called clipping when in the digital realm); I used a cassette tape of music recorded very loudly which showed peaks of +6dB and higher on the level-meters on the deck and set the input in Sound Forge to accept those levels at around -20dB or so.

Anyways, I captured the first track first, as a single .wav file, pausing the deck before ending the capture. The rest of the album was captured as two long .wav's: the rest of Side-A and all of B. I saved these very important files to disk and CD-R. I then opened copies of these files, and using the Zoom and Marker functions in Sound Forge, I split up all the tracks. I then removed all but exactly 2 seconds of silence at the end of each track (no need for long pauses for a possible eventual transfer to CD, and certainly not for PC playback) and saved the copies. I then converted copies of these files to .flac level-8 with ReplayGain data (Album) added for playback.


This version of the album is the best copy I know of to this day. Everything else I've found has been encoded lossily using .mp3 or even worse .rm/.ra, etc. Give these a listen and let me know how I did. I still have this tape, eventually when I get really good hardware, I'll capture it again, in a second playback run.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teenage_Mutant_Ninja_Turtles#Food_tie-ins