Re: arsclist Arhoolie Foundation - Digitizing Project

["David A. Day" <dad@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

This project sounds very interesting and you raise some good questions. I
hope those who respond will send to the whole list.

In our work at BYU we are using Diapason turntables and are pleased with
their performance. We use a dCS 24/192 A/C converter. We send this digital
signal to a Windows CEDAR system to clean up surface noise. We record each
track or piece to ProTools (Mac) and then lay out tracks to burn to CD. When
we have copyright clearance we also convert to MP3 for an online listening
reserve that we operate within the Music Library (not yet distributed over
the Internet).

I am very interested to learn what others are doing to preserve the high
resolution 24 bit computer files. I am also interested to learn what
databases are being used to index metadata and accompanying graphic files.
Is anyone out there using XML for this purpose?

This may be a stupid question, but is there a CD Recorder on the market that
burns Super CDs?


> Dear Arsclist,
> 
> I just joined up on this list so I don't know what has been covered
> before. But I was hopipng that some of you could us out.
> 
> The Arhoolie Foundation is about to digitize the Chris Strachwitz
> Frontera Collection (A large collection of vernacular Mexican and
> Mexican American Music) of 78s, 45s, LPs, tapes, cylinders and other
> source materials. We are working with the UCLA library and the Chicano
> Studies Department there.
> 
> The first part of the project, the 78s, comprises about 80,000 minutes
> of music (about 26,000 78 RPM sides). UCLA wants high resolution,
> probably, 96mhz/24 bit. They would like us to put it on a removable hard
> drive and send it to them as we do it and they will store it on their
> server at UCLA. We will also keep a copy for the Arhoolie Foundation.
> 
> We are looking for answers or opinions on the following questions.
> 
> A. Capturing the analog sound.
> 1. What is a good currently manufactured turntable with variable speed
> that will play 78s?
> 2. What is a good currently manufactured pre-amp, preferably one with
> various EQ curves?
> 3. What is a good cartridge that accepts a currently made 78 stylus?
> 
> B. The digitizing. We would like to use a PC instead of Mac.
> 1. What is a good model A/D converter?
> 2. What is a good sound card for the computer?
> 3. What program would be good to use to record and save the files?
> 4. What file format would be best to save these in? Is there a format
> that allows meta data to be attached?
> 5. Ideally, the Arhoolie Foundation would like to keep it's copy of a
> RAID server. This would require about 1.3 terabytes. Using SCSI drives
> this would be quite expensive. However, there are new IDE ATA 100 RAID
> systems that are coming about that are much cheaper and are large
> capacity. Do you have any knowledge about this.
> 6. We will also be taking a high resolution digital photo, of the source
> material. In the case of the 78s, this will be the 78 label. Do you know
> of a database system the would work as a good front end to manage all of
> this?
> 
> Thanks forany help you can give. Please email or call if you have any
> questions.
> 
> Best Regards,
> 
> Tom Diamant
> 
> Arhoolie Foundation
> 10341 San Pablo Ave.
> El Cerrito, CA 94530
> USA
> 
> phone: 510-525-7471
> fax: 510-525-1204
> email: tom@xxxxxxxxxxxx
> web site: http://www.arhoolie.com
> 
> 
> 
>