(no subject)

[42itous]

Can someone please give me a clue as to how to transfer an audio tape to a digital medium? Specifically, I have taped an interview that I want to place in five time capsules -- most of these will be opened in the next decade or so, but one needs to last 43 years, so if you want to debate what media will still be readable then, now's your chance.

Comments

[volta]

Analog tape to digital is not too hard, if you have a computer with audio in (virtually every computer made in the last 10 years does), and a tape deck with audio out. For media longevity, high quality digital tape, properly stored, can reliably be expected to last ~30 years without maintenance. Typical consumer-grade recordable CD/DVD media, not so much; 10 years at the outside, in near ideal conditions. Archival-grade recordable CD/DVD media should last longer, but I do not know if 43 years is within the design spec even on that. A "pressed" CD should outlast any recordable media easily, as would an analog record. Analog audio tape will almost certainly still be playable in 50 years, though the quality will likely have degraded noticably--I have some reel-to-reel tape that is nearly that old, stored in less-than-optimal conditions, and is still playable.

[xuth.livejournal.com]

Kodak gold (to my knowledge no longer made) and Mitsui gold (expect to pay a bit more than a dollar a disk online) recordable cd media are expected to last about 100 years (some people say longer, others have their doubts but all agree that these disks have much better dye longevity than typical disks). This of course assumes that the disk is taken care of. The big things are to keep the cd in a dark, cool area and DO NOT USE AN ADHESIVE LABEL on the cd. Depending on the label that can cut the usable lifetime of the disk to months. And of course don't physically abuse the disk.

Because the CD has become as ubiquitous as it has, it is as likely as any media format to still have players/readers around in 43 years but I'm hesitant to believe that they'll be at all common. But I would guess that in 43 years there will still be thousands of geeks of varying stripes with their 25 year old ultradvd player/drive that can also read blueray/hddvd/dvd/cd.

Making a standard audio cd (rather than a data cd with audio tracks) is imho the best solution for audio. This is a standard that billions of disks are pressed in, and is a well published standard. While it has less data redundency on disk (data cds have some redundent bits so that if a few bits go away the data is still there, audio cds don't) if an audio cd loses a few bits you'll just get a few holes in the audio stream and the cd player will recognize they're bad and smooth over them. If a data cd loses more bits than the error correction can handle it takes someone or something knowledgeable in data recovery (and possibly the specific file format) to get anything useful off of the disk at all.

[xuth.livejournal.com]

If you really want to make sure that someone can play this in 43 years, include a cheap cd player. Make sure that there are no batteries inside (or outside).