Digital conversion of tapes to files

[t...biteme]

Hello

I wisht o convert 30 minute tapes to a digital format.
Is it better to use MP3 or WAV files. My concern is that these will be lrge
files and may crash the hard drive?

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[Zak]

3. MP3 files are COMPRESSED, so they don't preserve
the complete quality of the original Of course if these are
grungy audio cassette tapes, the difference may be moot.

Take care. MP3 has a mode called 'joint stereo' that mono-izes out
signals that are equal left and right. Which works well enough, unless
the source is a stereo tape that wiggles a bit, making channels lag and
lead each other, which makes this optimization switch in and out which
sounds awful.

That said, higher bit rates usually leave this optimization off.


Thomas

 

[Michael]

Hello

I wisht o convert 30 minute tapes to a digital format.
Is it better to use MP3 or WAV files. My concern is that these will be lrge
files and may crash the hard drive?

Consider that one 3-4 minute, high fidelity, stereo file in WAV format
consumes something like 70-80 megabytes. A similar quality MP3 made
from tha file consumes a fraction of that amount but still several
megabytes.

The Ogg Vorbis compression algorithm allows somewhat higher compression
than MP3 with less artifacts => smaller files than MP3 that sound just
as good (or better) than MP3. Another plus is that while MP3 format is
proprietary, Ogg Vorbis is not. Ogg Vorbis files have the file
extension .OGG

 

[Ian Bell]

Take care. MP3 has a mode called 'joint stereo' that mono-izes out
signals that are equal left and right. Which works well enough, unless
the source is a stereo tape that wiggles a bit, making channels lag and
lead each other, which makes this optimization switch in and out which
sounds awful.

That said, higher bit rates usually leave this optimization off.

I may be wrong but I thought joint stereo creates L+R and L-R signals and
uses more bits for the L+R and the basis there is less info in the L-R
signal.

Ian

 

[Zak]

I may be wrong but I thought joint stereo creates L+R and L-R signals and
uses more bits for the L+R and the basis there is less info in the L-R
signal.

Could very well be what I meant - in any case this will break when
the original is stereo from a wiggling tape.


Thomas