The default audio inputs that come with your computer are probably not very good, so you need to have an audio card to which you would plug in your cassette player. These are relatively inexpensive, as is the audio capture software you would want to use. We use Adobe Audition, but on my Mac at home, I use a "Limited Edition" version of Peak with considerable success.
I would not go crazy worrying about perfect settings--you are, after all, capturing from cassette tape--not a high fidelity medium. Our naming scheme for similar work has been to incorporate the name and the date of the recording, with a "-#" to indicate which tape in a multiple tape recording, e.g., for Jane Doe's interviews, a folder called Doe_Jane20050314 (or Doe_Jane_2005-03-14, or whatever is convenient), and then files called Arditti_Rita20050314-1.wav, etc. We save files in .WAV format--WAV is a reasonable wrapper that should preserve the fidelity of the original. We then generate MP3 files for presentation--putting things on a CD for playing in a CD player or uploading to a website. But you don't want to go straight to mp3 because one day, when there are better tools, you will be stuck with the degraded, lossy mp3 file you settled for initially. What yo want is to be able to regenerate files every few years to whatever standard is then current, up to the fidelity limits of that originally captured file. You can comfortably use CD-ROM or DVD for working copies of files, but they are emphatically not preservation media. For that, you pretty much need live storage--a local RAID array and, preferably, two or more remote live disk systems for redundancy and disaster recovery. Metadata should include data on the contents, including geolocation, date or dateTime, as relevant, original media--Dublin Core provides a very reasonable starting point for descriptive metadata. And, any repository or DAM software should be able to pick up technical metadata automatically (file format, size, checksum or other file integrity check). Preservation metadata can be expressed using PREMIS, but you would have to figure out what is appropriate. At a minimum, that would include information on what you have done with the original, what derivatives have been created, any migration info as it accumulates, etc. That's probably the minimal basics--and even a bit more, depending on the actual project. Someone doing more work in this can probably chime in to point you to the relevant current specs. I'd see what is posted in the MCN digital media SIG page which should cover this and other subjects (but for all sorts of good reasons, starting with busy people and our lives, may not). Hope this helps, ari P.S. When we did a large project of this sort, we actually hired someone who had a disk/tape transfer studio in his photo studio to do the transfers for us very inexpensively. We lucked out--he was very attentive. We also weren't terribly worried since, as I said at the beginning, we =were= starting from cassette tape, and barring utter malfeasance, there was little the transfer process was likely to add in the way of noise. On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 5:01 PM, Heather Marie Wells <hmwells at springdaleark.org> wrote: > Hi all, > > I'm wondering if any of you have worked on converting cassette tapes to > digital files and what procedures you decided to follow in doing so. > > Specifically: > How did you store the digital? Burn it to CDs or DVDs, if so did you make > it data discs or a playable audio CD? Did you store it on a hard drive, > if so as a .WAV file or .MP3? > > What kind of naming scheme did you use for the digital file? > > What metadata did you include? > > Thanks, > Heather Marie > > Heather Marie Wells > Collections Assistant/Podcast Producer > Shiloh Museum of Ozark History > 118 W. Johnson Ave. > Springdale, AR 72764 > Phone: (479) 750-8165 > Fax: (479) 750-8693 > http://www.springdaleark.org/shiloh/ > > _______________________________________________ > You are currently subscribed to mcn-l, the listserv of the Museum Computer > Network (http://www.mcn.edu) > > To post to this list, send messages to: mcn-l at mcn.edu > > To unsubscribe or change mcn-l delivery options visit: > http://toronto.mediatrope.com/mailman/listinfo/mcn-l >
