Hi Jen, Along with the great LC and CDP links Mike Rippy and Richard Urban have suggested, other prospective resources include organizations focused on collections of recorded sound.* Two sites that could be worth exploring are:
Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC) http://www.arsc-audio.org International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA) http://www.iasa-web.org Also perhaps of use could be such meta-level lists of resources as: http://personal.stevens.edu/~vforrest/val/AudioArchiving/ To offer a dangerously general bit of background re: your specific question: AIFF and WAV both can store uncompressed audio at high sampling rates (e.g., 96kHz) and high bit depth (e.g., 24-bit), often good things for preservation; while mp3 has severe inherent limits that make it less useful in most archiving scenarios. By very rough analogy if you're used to dealing with images, you can think of AIFF and WAV as offering some of the good things that TIFF or JPEG 2000 do (e.g., an ability to store lots of high-resolution uncompressed information), and mp3 as being in certain ways broadly comparable to JPEG (both can efficiently deliver small, compressed files to end-users, but at a price generally paid in lost visual or audio information). This is a drastically reductive synopsis--maybe useful as a stepping stone to more nuanced and detailed resources you may find, but not as anything more. :) hope this helps, Rob * The Audio Engineering Society (http://aes.org) also deals seriously with preservation, and has Standards Committee working groups concerned with this area; much of their work tends to be more technically oriented than focused on creating and disseminating timely recommendations or best practices for end-users. _________________________________________________________________ Rob Lancefield rlancefield at wesleyan.edu Manager of Museum Information Services / Registrar of Collections Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University www.wesleyan.edu/dac 301 High Street, Middletown CT 06459 USA tel. 860.685.2965 Board of Directors, Museum Computer Network www.mcn.edu At 2:08 PM -0700 8/1/06, jpearson at berkeley.edu wrote: >Hello group, > >Does anyone have information on the best Archival Audio Standards and Best >Practices? > >Mp3, AIFF, WAV. I appreciate any advice! > >Thank you > >Jen
