20 Oct
2003
20 Oct
'03
6:12 a.m.
On Oct 20, 8:10, John A. Dundas III wrote:
I have a number of old DECUS U.S. Symposium audio
tapes that I would
like to archive before they completely disintegrate. I have a way to
digitize these and store them in a variety of formats. I'm not sure
what format is best for archive and distribution, though I assume
something like WAV or AIFF for archive and MP3 for distribution.
That sounds reasonable, but beware of WAV -- although originally it was
effectively a byte-swapped AIFF format, it's been added to in so many
ways that a WAV file could contain just about anything. If you use
AIFF at 44100Hz you can write the tracks to a CD-R using just about any
writer software.
MP3 is pretty good for distribution. It's reasonably compact, better
supported than just about any other compressed format, and not likely
to go away any time soon. Of course, it's lossy so don't use it for
archives (I'm sure you weren't planning to).
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Network Manager
University of York