Question re copying cassette tapes

[William J Poser]

I should perhaps clarify that I'm not so much arguing that you ought
to use a lower sampling rate as that you shouldn't feel obligated to
use a 44.1 K rate and shouldn't feel ashamed of producing inferior
material if you do use a lower (but still sufficiently high) rate.

Here's my overall position, for the usual situation in which lots of
storage is available. (Those archiving data on, say, old satellites,
are in a different situation.) If you want to save space, the sequence
in which techniques should be used is as follows:

(a) record/digitize mono rather than stereo
    This gives you a savings of 50% at no cost in quality.
    If you're working with something like conversational data this
    will not be true, so this applies only to monologues.

(b) use a lossless compression technique such as FLAC
    This gives you a savings of about 50% (variable depending on the
    data) at no cost in quality. For some people this might be the
    first technique to use rather than the second. I prefer not to have
    to decompress to work with the data (if it isn't long term archival),
    but your mileage may vary.

(c) use a lower sampling rate
    If you use a rate of 22.05K, this gives you a savings of 50%
    at little or no cost in quality. This applies only to pure speech data.
    Some music may well contain higher frequency components of significance.

(d) use a lossy compression technique
    Don't. Ever. With current hardware there is unlikely to be any
    justification for doing this. (For some devices/users you may need to
    create MP3s, but these should be regarded as inferior versions of the
    material. Also, you may be able to use a high bit-rate MP3 and avoid
    most of the distortion.)

Bill