TASCAM recovery

TL;DR if you have a TASCAM 788 backup and don’t know how to get the audio out of it this script might help. Also: AI tools work best when paired with expertise. I needed to take a very personal excursion into digital preservation recently as I attempted to listen to some audio recordings my brother John had made about 20 years ago. John died recently, and is sorely missed by his friends and family. He was a continuous source of inspiration for me, because of his many varied interests and projects. One thing he did consistently since he was a teenager was perform music as a singer-songwriter. As my family and I went through the very difficult process of emptying his apartment, we discovered a set of recordings he had made on CD-R. Three of these CDs were clearly conceived of as albums, and easily mounted as CDDA when I popped them in my CD player. However he also left a binder of CD-Rs, where each CD was neatly labeled with a song title and a year. All in all there are 108 of them,…