Archiving tapes

From: Tom Jennings <tomj_at_wps.com>
Date: Sun Feb 20 15:55:10 2005

On Sun, 20 Feb 2005, Peter Hicks wrote:

> I have a bunch of old BBC B/Acorn Electron and Spectrum cassettes laying
> around here doing nothing. They're at least 12 years old, and I want to try
> to preserve them before they deteriorate.
>
> My initial thought was to sample them and convert in to MP3 format, burning
> to CD. However, MP3 is lossy compression. I also wondered how I'd restore
> them to a machine to test them, but came up with no answer.

Good old crappy .WAV files, no compression, might be a good way to
start if you can make those. They could them be later compressed
to FLAC or whatever. Files are large, but who cares.

Pretty much everything can read/process .WAV files. Mor eimportant
would be sample rate, etc. You might do a sample and get levels
right and all that. WIth casettes it can be tough, you might get the
level set right at one end of the tape an dthe other is down in the
noise or clipping.
Received on Sun Feb 20 2005 - 15:55:10 GMT