Question re copying cassette tapes

[Neskie Manuel]

I would record at the highest rate even though, as Bill points out,
that it is a waste of space. Terabyte Hard drives are the norm.  If
you are worried about space make sure you compress with a lossless
compressions such as FLAC, programs like Audacity can do this
natively.  Audacity also has a timer for the record function so you
can set it to record for 30 minutes, and it is available for Linux,
Mac, Windows. This list is ordered for a reason ;)

I don't think it really matters when burning to a CD what sample rate
you use, because programs like iTunes or Windows Media Player usually
upsample and convert to a WAV before the burn it to a CD anyways.

On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 3:57 PM, Aidan Wilson <aidan at usyd.edu.au> wrote:
> While I disagree about the benefits or otherwise of higher resolutions and
> sample rates in digitisation, the point is, that an audio CD must be stereo,
> 44.1 kHz, 16 bit.
>
> Anything else will not play on any regular CD player (that is, which isn't a
> computer that can interpret the wav header). The reason is that audio CD wav
> files don't contain headers; they're raw PCM data - 1s and 0s. CD players
> are designed to interpret those 1s and 0s as stereo, 16 bit 44.1 kHz.
> Altering the properties, if it plays at all, will have effects on the audio
> such as playing too fast/slow (if the sample rate is incorrect) or just
> outputting digital noise.
>
> --
> Aidan Wilson
>
> The University of Sydney
> +612 9036 9558
> +61428 458 969
> aidan.wilson at sydney.edu.au
>
> On Thu, 11 Feb 2010, William J Poser wrote:
>
>> I'm not so sure about the recommendation of stereo digitisation. If
>> the originals are not stereo recordings, there's no point in creating a
>> stereo digital recording, and indeed, even if there are two channels
>> on the original tapes, if they do not reflect inputs from two different
>> microphones, you don't have a true stereo recording and there isn't much
>> point in preserving two channels.
>>
>> Also, 44.1 K samples/second is overkill for most linguistic material. If
>> it contains music, such a rate may be desirable, but for most speech,
>> 22.05 K samples per second includes all of the information likely
>> to be of linguistic significance.
>>
>> 16 bit resolution is highly desirable, but there's nothing sacred about
>> 44.1K samples/per second sampling rate and stereo. These are merely
>> residues of decisions made by the music industry and have nothing to
>> do with the quality of linguistic recordings.
>>
>> Bill
>>
>>
>



-- 
Neskie Manuel
http://neskiemanuel.ath.cx
Voicemail: 1 (866)-423-0911
SIP: mac at sip.ca2.link2voip.com
Skype: neskiemanuel
Identi.ca: http://identi.ca/neskie