Transferring audiotaped speech to CDs

[Shana Walton]

yall --

I read Celso's note and have lived through everything he's written. Just
to add my two cents:
We are now in the process of transferring all (several hundred hours) of
audio tape recordings in our oral history collection to digital
preservation. Barbara Johnstone is correct in writing that paper is
better than digital, but it doesn't preserve sound. After investigation,
we are using CD Roms and hard drives. Nothing is permanent. Hard drives
are easier to migrate your data from one format to another when they
start becoming obsolete. Hard drives, however, do not sit on shelves as
well as CD Roms. The best digital preservation is DVD. We are moving
selected things to DVD as soon as we can get the money together and then
putting it on a "juke box." DVD burning is expensive.

We do all the CD Rom burning in house and it's no big deal. The whole
set up cost us money for the sound card (SoundBlaster Live! Platinum --
anything under that is not fancy enough to do much manipulation), the
sound editing software (We're using SoundForge), the CD burner (We have
a Hewlett Packard), and the burning software (We're using both Adaptec
and Nero Burning Rom (because they have different strengths). I have a
list somewhere of all the sound cards and their comparative strengths
and weaknesses that I used when comparison shopping. We decided since we
were dealing with voice quality that we didn't need the fanciest thing
on the market.
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