Archiving reel-to-reel tapes
Posted: Sat Jul 17, 2004 9:13 pm
Been a while since I've posted here...
I have an interesting project here.
A family friend of ours was sent to Vietnam in the late 60's. While he was out there, he and his wife communicated via tapes sent back and forth. They've kept these tapes over the years, and now we've been asked to encode these tapes on the computer.
I'm not really up on the terminology of these tapes (as we're talking reel-to-reel here, and I was born the year they invented the CD), but from what I gather, they're 1 7/8, 4.8cm tapes that are 15 minutes per side. We finally found a player that'll handle this, a SONY TC-355. It's a stereo player with a mono tape, so we have the left channel hooked into my Audigy Drive. Now, I have a few things I'd like to do with this.
1) Record this into a raw format (.WAV, I assume?), and make it so I can take the mono channel into a stereo channel.
2) Remove the 60Hz "hum" in the background, and maybe clean up the sound a bit, if possible.
3) Put it into a good, easily accessible format (~192kbps MP3?).
From searching this forum, It looks like I can do most of it by using Audacity (to encode into WAV and remove noise) and LAME (to put it to MP3). Is this the best solution to doing this? Any other suggestions as to how I can do this?
I really don't want to experiment much with these tapes - they're very brittle. I'd prefer to do it all once, the right way, and minimize any possible damage.
Thanks in advance.
.:Ttocs
I have an interesting project here.
A family friend of ours was sent to Vietnam in the late 60's. While he was out there, he and his wife communicated via tapes sent back and forth. They've kept these tapes over the years, and now we've been asked to encode these tapes on the computer.
I'm not really up on the terminology of these tapes (as we're talking reel-to-reel here, and I was born the year they invented the CD), but from what I gather, they're 1 7/8, 4.8cm tapes that are 15 minutes per side. We finally found a player that'll handle this, a SONY TC-355. It's a stereo player with a mono tape, so we have the left channel hooked into my Audigy Drive. Now, I have a few things I'd like to do with this.
1) Record this into a raw format (.WAV, I assume?), and make it so I can take the mono channel into a stereo channel.
2) Remove the 60Hz "hum" in the background, and maybe clean up the sound a bit, if possible.
3) Put it into a good, easily accessible format (~192kbps MP3?).
From searching this forum, It looks like I can do most of it by using Audacity (to encode into WAV and remove noise) and LAME (to put it to MP3). Is this the best solution to doing this? Any other suggestions as to how I can do this?
I really don't want to experiment much with these tapes - they're very brittle. I'd prefer to do it all once, the right way, and minimize any possible damage.
Thanks in advance.
.:Ttocs