On Sun 23 May 2010 21:31:56 NZST +1200, Julian Visch wrote: > Have a huge audio tape collection and think it is high time I started > converting them into some form of digital format while tape decks still > exist. What would people recommend, SoundStudio seems to be able > to record but these files will be huge, should I be converting to vorbis or > mp3 or what?
A number of programs are theoretically capable of recording. Mic that is, line-in I couldn't get to work even on basic popular audio hardware a while back. Basically, audio input in Linux sucks. Assuming you have a 16bit audio file in your computer, you'll want to do a lossless compression for your archive, and then you may do a lossy one to reduce file size for playback on $YOURGIMMICK. For compression you have a number of options. ogg-flac is lossless (ogg-enc is not). There's a brilliant program called shorten which allows you to specify the lossyness, or rather the number of bits to keep. Given that your original is some cruddy MC tape, you won't have 16bit anyway. Many sound cards are pretty shocking too, I've seen ground not being digitised to 0. No idea how many bits your tape will give you, maybe not more than 12. You actually reduce noise by just cutting it off, so use shorten to only compress 12 bits. Or write a piece of software which sets the lower 4 bits to 0. That'll also save some space. You can't achieve the same effect with ogg-enc or any compression scheme unless you know that it is explicitly designed to be able to discard lower-order bits. Have fun, Volker -- Volker Kuhlmann http://volker.dnsalias.net/ Please do not CC list postings to me.
