Re: [ARSCLIST] Please help: quantifying progress

[Tom Fine <tflists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Richard's key statement is his last sentence. Linear feet is a silly way to measure progress with 
sound recordings. Let me give a for-instance. A multi-year project just finished, the client had a 
few hundred tapes and about 150 grooved disks. What do you think cost them more grant money and took 
me more time? The grooved disks, which took up maybe 1/3 of the shelf space of the tapes. So shelf 
space is irrelevant, it's time spent crunching the source material.

I never estimate job costs on things like size of shelf space needed to store the material. I don't 
even go on number of tapes until I look at each batch of material to make sure I understand the tape 
format and speed. Just as a for-instance as to how useless space-displacement is as a measure of 
audio material -- a 10" NAB reel of 1/4" tape can contain as little as 15 minutes of full-track or 
2-track audio at 30IPS, 1.5-mil tape. The exact same reel, if it were 1-mil tape, could contain 6 
hours of 1/4-track stereo at 3.75IPS or 12 hours of 1/4-track mono, such as MANY collections of old 
radio dubs.

Connie, you've built your own excellent example with slides vs. prints for still-images. Slides are 
tiny but they usually take longer to process. Prints might take up more shelf space but get 
digitized faster.

So, for at least this one instance in life ... size really doesn't matter. It's all about the 
time-demands per item.

As for a troublesome board of directors, I would suggest your best way to either fix that problem, 
or to quickly conclude that it is not fixable and thus your or they need to go a separate way, would 
be to invite them to spend a day walking behind you so they can see exactly what is involved with 
what you do. As long as a reasonable adult sees that you spend your time in a reasonable way, then 
there should be no problem.

-- Tom Fine

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Richard L. Hess" <arclists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, November 18, 2008 1:31 PM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] Please help: quantifying progress


> Hello, Connie,
>
> One of the challenges with sound recordings is that they can have substantially different 
> durations for the same physically sized artifact.
>
> You mention discs, as I'm sure you're aware, a 12" disc can be recorded at 78, 33-1/3, or <gasp> 
> even 16-2/3 revolutions per minute. While a 78 side is typically one song, a 33-1/3 rpm 
> microgroove recording might yield typically six songs and the 16-2/3 rpm disc would yield double 
> that. I won't provide timings because there are people more knowledgeable than I concerning 
> grooved media on this list.
>
> As to tapes, you might find the following tape timing chart useful for reel-to-reel tapes in your 
> collection:
> http://richardhess.com/notes/formats/magnetic-media/magnetic-tapes/analog-audio/tape-timing-chart/
>
> The challenge here is that it is not uncommon for a 7-inch reel to house anywhere from a half hour 
> (or less) to eight hours or more and unless you look at the fine print, you won't know.
>
> So, conventional metrics as to the amount of content for sound recordings may not be strictly 
> applicable.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Richard
>
> At 01:18 PM 2008-11-18, you wrote:
> > Wow what a couple of great sites! Thank you! I am still hoping for something
> > like this for audio records. Thanks again Jeanette!
>
> Richard L. Hess                   email: richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Aurora, Ontario, Canada       (905) 713 6733     1-877-TAPE-FIX
> Detailed contact information: http://www.richardhess.com/tape/contact.htm
> Quality tape transfers -- even from hard-to-play tapes.