Digital conversion of tapes to files

1. If your hard drive crashes when full, then you have other problems that have nothing to do with your question.
2. MP3 files are virtually always (MUCH) smaller than WAV files.

1. MP3 files are COMPRESSED, so they don't preserve the complete quality of the original Of course if these are grungy audio cassette tapes, the difference may be moot.

Take care. MP3 has a mode called 'joint stereo' that mono-izes out signals that are equal left and right. Which works well enough, unless the source is a stereo tape that wiggles a bit, making channels lag and lead each other, which makes this optimization switch in and out which sounds awful.

That said, higher bit rates usually leave this optimization off.

Thomas

Consider that one 3-4 minute, high fidelity, stereo file in WAV format consumes something like 70-80 megabytes. A similar quality MP3 made from tha file consumes a fraction of that amount but still several megabytes.

The Ogg Vorbis compression algorithm allows somewhat higher compression than MP3 with less artifacts => smaller files than MP3 that sound just as good (or better) than MP3. Another plus is that while MP3 format is proprietary, Ogg Vorbis is not. Ogg Vorbis files have the file extension .OGG

I may be wrong but I thought joint stereo creates L+R and L-R signals and uses more bits for the L+R and the basis there is less info in the L-R signal.

Ian

Could very well be what I meant :) - in any case this will break when the original is stereo from a wiggling tape.

Thomas