oryoki2000 wrote:
> The stream of digitized audio into the computer is received by an
> audio editing program. Sound Forge and Cool Edit are two of several
> popular audio editor for PCs. SoundStudio and Spark are two popular
> Mac audio editors.
Peak is probably the most common one used by nature recordists for the
routine work. Spark has a bit complex interface for this sort of thing,
slower and more awkward to work with. Spark is much better reserved for
filtering and such like. And for it's sonograms.
> A standard 74 minute CD-R can hold approximately 650 MB of data, or
> about an hour's worth of stereo WAV or AIFF files (two hours for
> monaural). Recordable DVD formats increase this to 4.7GB of data, or
> about seven times as much as a CD-R. So you can expect to store
> about seven hours' worth of stereo WAV files on one DVD.
I don't buy the 650 meg CD-R's anymore. The 700 meg ones are very cheap
and just as good.
Note that the flip side of this is that to work with DVD's you are going
to need much more free hard disk space. For CD's I figure 1 gig per
active CD. That gives room for editing, scratch files and so on. You
probably don't need that kind of multiplier for DVD. 5-6 gigs per DVD
should do it.
Since at times I need quite a number of CD's on at once, this can really
add up. I was really tight at times when I was running three HD's
totaling about 65 gigs. Typically there's part of the year when I have
all of that year's recordings on HD and maybe quite a few others. I'm
now working with three 72 gig HD's inside my G4, each split into two
partitions. The CD project this fall may fill a large part of that
before it's done.
For working with audio, choose the fastest HD's, and reliable ones. You
can have quite a investment of time in what's on HD. So, I like to have
my working disk a separate one from my system disk. Usually if a system
messes up it damages it's disk and not the others. I use Quantum Ultra
160 SCSI disks (now Maxtor) and that works fairly well with audio files.
It's not unusual to be editing files of half a gig or more in size.
Which means huge scratch files are being written and rewritten, to say
nothing of saving the main file. Fast disks make this all go much more smoo=
thly.
> There are several competing formats of recordable DVDs. I recommend
> using DVD-R today to make archival copies of your work. The
> competing DVD+R has the potential to record faster in the future, but
> DVD-R is more likely to create a disc that you can read in other
> computers, and more likely to create DVD-Audio discs that can be
> played back in a standard DVD player. Re-writable DVDs are also
> available (called DVD-RW and DVD+RW in the competing formats), but
> the discs cost more, and take an hour to prepare for use. When
> you're creating an archival copy of your recordings, DVD-R is the way
> to go today.
It's these sorts of issues that keep me from using DVD for archiving.
I'm waiting for the dust to settle and winners to be declared. It's a
lot of time and money invested in archiving, you want the disk format to
be around a while. If DVD follows the pattern of CD, in a few years it
will all begin to stabilize.
> The process of recording DVDs sounds more complicated than it is in
> practice. Once you've got your machine set up, you just grab a DVD,
> stick it in the drive, and go. You'll spend far more time with the
> sound editing program selecting cuts from the digitized audio than
> you will in the DVD archiving process.
This is true of CD as well. Worst part for me is I'm used to real
optical disks. Those mount and are used just like any other removable
disk. Copy files on or off at will, even run the files from the disk,
edit them and save back to the disk. I use CD for older stuff that I
need to keep but not actively change. And as a alternate format (audio
CD) for my archive.
Walt
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