I discovered lots of early 90s tapes yesterday...

[Bonteburg]

I've been listening to them all night, mixtapes, stuff from MTV 120 Minutes, me and my mates goofing around and bits off the news...

I know Nostalgia sucks especially when you've reached your thirties but
this is worth archiving isn't it?

My question is simple, mp3 or wav?

-Obviously sampling an average casette as wav would result in a file sized anywhere between 500 MB and 1,5 GB, which is a) not feasible at all in terms of disk space and b) awkward to burn to a regular CD.

-On the other hand mp3 IS a lossy format and, even though i don't really give a toss, once you convert that to a wav for sampling etc, make a track, save that as mp3, I think after a time it'll start to show for real.

So here are the pros and cons. i was gonna make a poll but... hell I'll make one just because i havent in such a long time

Anyway.....Experiences? Opinions?

Marco

[chagzuki]

Why not use a lossless compression format?

[WoJ]

why not .ogg?

[Stratification]

Mmm - seems like a good idea at the time, but you'll get fed up of transferring them across to the computer.

I've got stacks of cassettes, and every so often I start a similar 'save that for nostalgia' binge - but it normally only lasts for 1 1/2 tapes.

If you're serious about going ahead with it, I'd save them as wav's and burn them off onto CD's.

And of course the temptation is once you've got them onto the computer that you're going to want to try and master them or clean them up in some way - which is another job in itself!

[efluon]

best would be to denoise and filter and afterwards compress to mp3

[Dunbar]

hehe - just started doing the same thing. I found a bunch of tapes of John Peel i recorded in 1990/91.

I've converted them to FLAC - i'm not going to attempt a clean-up job; too time consuming.

[Trojan Badger]

I voted wav - I reckon in 10 years we'll still have WAV but we may have moved on from MP3, and for archiving's sake you never know how long it'll be till you next revisit it.

[Hanglow]

monkeys audio or .ogg then?

[Distorted_Mastermind]

cd's are cheap. I would keep it as a WAV file til it was burnt to cd....then delete it from the drive. I will probably always have a tape deck and do sample from some old tapes from time to time. None of the stuff I have on tape is really of interest to me for anything besides sampling. I just leave it on the tape if I don't need it.
If you want to archive all your tapes to digital format that could take a while. For myself it's not worth the time. Most of the music I know well and can find what I want to sample quick.
Sampling from tape is good for lofi heads and people that don't want everything to sound pretty. Seems kind of lame to add tape noise with an effect when most of us have a tape deck laying around. Also free samples on the radio. Recently I bought a few blank tapes to record the jazz , classical, and oldies stations to get a few notes to rip here and there.
Anyway that's my negative 2 cents

[sleepingsword]

tape is so lofi I would rip, restore then mp3 em

tis what I do with my old dreamscape tapes

[Debutante]

lossles wav depending on how imprtant they are or may be later

[junebug]

I've been listening to them all night, mixtapes, stuff from MTV 120 Minutes
Marco

120 minutes....
ahhhhh, the good 'ol days!

Kevin Seal hosting days? any chance someone might know a BAND NAME for me? the video was played on 120 minutes ONCE and the track was called "CANARY SONG" - tried google and all the major sources of tracking it down with no success. any takers?


JUNEBUG