Recommendations for archiving audio tapes

From: Pete Turnbull <pete_at_dunnington.u-net.com>
Date: Mon Oct 20 13:12:54 2003

On Oct 20, 8:10, John A. Dundas III wrote:
> I have a number of old DECUS U.S. Symposium audio tapes that I would
> like to archive before they completely disintegrate. I have a way to
> digitize these and store them in a variety of formats. I'm not sure
> what format is best for archive and distribution, though I assume
> something like WAV or AIFF for archive and MP3 for distribution.

That sounds reasonable, but beware of WAV -- although originally it was
effectively a byte-swapped AIFF format, it's been added to in so many
ways that a WAV file could contain just about anything. If you use
AIFF at 44100Hz you can write the tracks to a CD-R using just about any
writer software.

MP3 is pretty good for distribution. It's reasonably compact, better
supported than just about any other compressed format, and not likely
to go away any time soon. Of course, it's lossy so don't use it for
archives (I'm sure you weren't planning to).

-- 
Pete						Peter Turnbull
						Network Manager
						University of York
Received on Mon Oct 20 2003 - 13:12:54 BST

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