Bernie wrote:
"We got about 3500 hrs of habitat recordings, marine and
terrestrial, and about 15,000 creatures, all catalogued, archived
digitally, cross-referenced, recorded in either XY or MS stereo
since 1968."
Bernie,
Wow, 3500 hrs is a lot of recordings! Have you considered
compressing the audio in a lossless audio compression program? There
are a bunch of free programs out there that will compress PCM 16bit
stereo files to approximately 50% of original size. The only
disadvantage is that you would need to decompress the files in order
to listen to them. The following link provides a review of ten such
programs: http://www.firstpr.com.au/audiocomp/lossless/
I downloaded the first one on the list (Shorten) and found that it
compressed at the rate of 371mb/minute and decompressed at
603mb/minute on a P4 2ghz computer with 800mb Ram.
Running some numbers, it would take about 200 dvd's (which can be
purchased for $1-$2 each in 25 pack spindles) to store the 3500
hours of recordings in a compressed format. On a typical dvd burner
with 4x write speed, this would equate to 154 hours of burn time and
an additional 9 hours to initially compress the files.
This is just a thought. Does anybody else use lossless audio
compression for archiving purposes?
Darren Cohen
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