audio recording

[Heidi Johnson]

On Thursday, September 9, 2004, at 05:54 PM, William J Poser (by way of
Nicholas Thieberger) wrote:
> MP3 compression is definitely not a good idea for linguistic
> recordings.
> The ATRAC compression used by minidisc recorders is not as bad as MP3
> compression, and contrary to some claims, data recorded on minidisc
> recorders can be used for most kinds of phonetic analysis. [...]

I am diligently trying to discourage UT's documentary linguists from
using minidiscs,
but nevertheless, we have quite a lot of them just from the past 3-4
years. What do
y'all think is the best way to convert these beasties to the PCM
archival format?
We have one minidisk player that will produce digital output that we
can then read
into CoolEdit, and then save the recording in wav format. Or we could
play the
minidisk recording and redigitize the analog output. I'm not perfectly
convinced
that that's not more or less what's happening with the digital output...

Any advice would be most welcome. We have a bag of minidiscs with some
wonderful recordings that a Kuna research project made last year under
Joel's
direction.

Thanks,
Heidi


Heidi Johnson, PhD					ailla at ailla.org
Project Manager					www.ailla.utexas.org
The Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America
Dept. of Anthropology, EPS 1.130
1 University Station C3200
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, Texas 78712
U.S.A.