18 Mar
2016
18 Mar
'16
4 p.m.
Dear Jim,
Nick, Nancy, and Emily all have good suggestions about the process, so let me add in my
two cents:
I have been using a program called 'sound studio' on my Mac for many years now. It
costs about $70, but I have found that it is well worth it. I have used audacity and
GarageBand as well and found both of them to be very difficult and frustrating to use. I
would highly recommend 'sound studio'.
As far as hardware goes, all my iMacs over the last 15 years have had stereo analog line
level audio inputs on them and I have simply connected the cassette recorder to those
inputs to record. If you have a portable mac that does not have an analog line level input
on it, there are several products that cost under $100 and provide Stereo audio to USB
conversion, such as the iMic.
Regarding files to store the raw material: I highly recommend saving them as mono MP3
files at 128kbps or lower. This will significantly reduce storage space and will be far
better quality than the material that comes off a cassette deck. There is no point to
store them as wave files because that is a total waste of disk space.
Neither MP3 or WAVE files allow you to identify anything in them except by a file name. I
have found the best way to do that is to keep text files as log sheets for what's in
the file itself. Yes, you can go through and separate out the larger file into lots of
smaller files with very different names, but that's a lot of work and it probably is
not worth it at all. I strongly suggest using MP3 files and text files to identify the
parts of the MP3 files as these formats will probably be around for a long time and will
survive operating system changes, software obsolescence, and anything else you can think
of.
As far as cleaning up the files, I question the worth of doing that. I know of no
automatic programs that will do that for you, and it is a lot of work to do it manually.
Sound studio has controls in it to implement high-pass and low-pass filters to get rid of
rumble in hiss, but just turning the tone controls on your playback device will achieve
much the same thing on a temporary basis. As I understand it, your object here is to
extract information from these recordings about techniques and timing and stuff like that
rather than making them into listening enjoyment objects. If there are a few files that
deserve this treatment, then go for it – otherwise you will quickly burn out if you try to
do that to all the files.
As Nancy said, this is a worthwhile project to do for your own edification, but probably
you should not have any illusions that many others will be particularly interested.
Good luck,
Walter
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Walter Lenk Cambridge Ma 617-547-7781
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