803cd Posted February 21, 2007 Report Share Posted February 21, 2007 I have recorded a collection of 50 ten year old tapes of radio shows. These were good quality BBC FM broadcasts recorded onto TDK SA90's with Dolby S - state of the art 1993. These are now saved on my hard drive in Hi-SP format (with DRM stripped as helpfully recommended from this forum). In order to free up hard drive space I wish to archive these recordings onto DVD - my question is what the best format music file to use is? Although these ATRAC recordings are currently free of DRM I guess I am a little concerned that somewhere along the line Sony will unhelpfully make these unplayable when I come to use them again in the future! Thanks for your help. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sparky191 Posted February 21, 2007 Report Share Posted February 21, 2007 Well I think you'll always be able to find a ATRAC convertor if nothing else. However I would say a lossless format like FLAC or a compressed format like MP3 is likely to be around for quite a while. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raintheory Posted February 21, 2007 Report Share Posted February 21, 2007 I use FLAC personally. Great open-source lossless codec. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sparky191 Posted February 21, 2007 Report Share Posted February 21, 2007 (edited) DVD isn't a great medium for long term backup. Basically they fade over time. As they are cheap you might aswell do it anyway. But I would recommend ALSO keeping your files on two hard disks. Keep one on the computer, perhaps as a 2nd drive or connected externally. And a another hard drive in a external box which you keep in another location, garage, firebox whereever. I also use the scenerio of fire or a robbery, to make people think about how secure their backup if some one stole the computer and all the gear around it. Or a fire even localised to a room or two at home. I assume you keep the tapes as a back up aswell. Edited February 21, 2007 by Sparky191 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cochra1 Posted February 21, 2007 Report Share Posted February 21, 2007 (edited) I agree with the previous poster. If the recordings are that precious to you, get an external hard drive and stick them on that.As for the file format, in terms of quality you should get all your original tapes recorded from a high quality tape machine onto your PC via a decent quality sound card, in uncompressed WAV format (disgard your ATRAC copies, they aren't worth the limitations). You can save a lot of disc space by zipping up the files in compressed folders.There's plenty of recording software/sequencers out there that'll record your sounds without adding DRM protection - in fact check out the freeware that's available. And even if the files are wrapped up in DRM there are many more programs that'll remove it too.But to be honest, if you're recording onto your PC from an analogue source, there is no way you'll be forced by most recording software to apply DRM if you don't want it (and who does). Edited February 21, 2007 by KanakoAndTheNumbSkulls Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sparky191 Posted February 21, 2007 Report Share Posted February 21, 2007 He already has them recorded in HiSP? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cochra1 Posted February 21, 2007 Report Share Posted February 21, 2007 He already has them recorded in HiSP?Yes he does, that's right. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
803cd Posted February 22, 2007 Author Report Share Posted February 22, 2007 Yes he does, that's right.Thanks all for your comments.The files are in Hi-SP format already and are free from DRM - I'm perfectly happy with this level of compression as the source material is a tape of FM broadcast material so quality level is fine. Given this I guess my question is more specifically is any proprietary format suitable for long term (say 10 years) storage (ATRAC/WMA/MP3 etc) or is open source the way to go. Given its ubiquitous nature is MP3 close enough to open source? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ozpeter Posted February 22, 2007 Report Share Posted February 22, 2007 Any conversion from ATRAC to anything else lossy (ie mp3) is not a good idea.Put them on good quality CDs. Keep an installation version of the software required to play them. It's going to be a long time till nothing will read a CD. And as new formats emerge, you can copy them from there. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sparky191 Posted February 22, 2007 Report Share Posted February 22, 2007 What you want is a lossless compressed format. Like Flac, Apple Lossless or ATRAC Lossless. Whereas ATRAC/MP3/WMA are Lossy and Compressed. I'd use FLAC myself if I was you. However...Original tape to HiSP is lower quality than Original tape to FLAC. Original tape to HiSP and then to FLAC is lower again but maybe acceptable so you don't have to digistise everything all over again. Original tape to HiSP and then to FLAC and then back to ATRAC/MP3 degrades it yet again. Basically everytime you encode something via a lossy encoder you are losing data. So you want to do that as little as possible. So you could digitise Original tape to Flac and then use a player that supports FLAC natively. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cochra1 Posted February 22, 2007 Report Share Posted February 22, 2007 What you want is a lossless compressed format. Like Flac, Apple Lossless or ATRAC Lossless. Whereas ATRAC/MP3/WMA are Lossy and Compressed. I'd use FLAC myself if I was you. However...Original tape to HiSP is lower quality than Original tape to FLAC. Original tape to HiSP and then to FLAC is lower again but maybe acceptable so you don't have to digistise everything all over again. Original tape to HiSP and then to FLAC and then back to ATRAC/MP3 degrades it yet again. Basically everytime you encode something via a lossy encoder you are losing data. So you want to do that as little as possible. So you could digitise Original tape to Flac and then use a player that supports FLAC natively.Absolutely right. Everytime you convert from one format to another, some kind of loss happens. That's why I recommended ditching your ATRAC files and starting again by recording them in WAV (I don't know anything about 'Flac' but that sounds like it would make sense also). From there you can always make compressed copies in whatever format for your convenience but would be secure in the knowledge that faithful non-lossy digital backups are safely stored. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sparky191 Posted February 22, 2007 Report Share Posted February 22, 2007 Lossless files are exact copies of the original. You can copy WAV to FLAC and back to WAV and you won't lose any quality. Some lossless files like WAV are uncompressed, and hence very large files sizes. You can't tag WAV's either. Whereas formats like FLAC are compressed, so much smaller and can be tagged. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WaywardTraveller Posted February 25, 2007 Report Share Posted February 25, 2007 At the risk of being somewhat off-topic...is there a discussion thread about the best medium ("format?") on which to archive important data for long-term storage? I.e. what brand of CD-R or DVD+/-R (Sony, TDK, Memorex) is known to be good for long-term storage? I'm very conscientous about backing up important data, and my backup CD/DVDs are stored in volume cases away from heat, sunlight and dust.If someone could point me to any threads on this I'd appreciate it (I'm on a crappy computer that takes ages to load up pages and searches are painful )peaceWaywardTraveller Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sparky191 Posted February 25, 2007 Report Share Posted February 25, 2007 Dunno much about it myself. Theres loads of sites with infomation though.http://www.cdmediaworld.com/hardware/cdrom...factories.shtml Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pata2001 Posted February 26, 2007 Report Share Posted February 26, 2007 At the risk of being somewhat off-topic...is there a discussion thread about the best medium ("format?") on which to archive important data for long-term storage? I.e. what brand of CD-R or DVD+/-R (Sony, TDK, Memorex) is known to be good for long-term storage? I'm very conscientous about backing up important data, and my backup CD/DVDs are stored in volume cases away from heat, sunlight and dust.For CD media: Anything that Made in Japan (highly likely to be Taiyo Yuden)DVD media: Verbatim (regardless of country of origin, preferably Made in Japan/Singapore) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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