Digitising sound – first steps

The equipment for digitising the oral history and radio tapes has now been set up and is ready to go! The tapes will be played on two ex-BBC Studer A807 tape players. These marvellous machines are sturdy workhorses which just seem to keep going and going. For software we’re using Adobe Audition 3 on Samsung laptops, but rather than trust the laptop soundcards which may suffer from the electronic noise generated by the surrounding circuitry, we have gone for separate E-mu Tracker Pre analogue to digital converters.

Having listened to a few test recordings I have to say the results sound very good. I shall update my thoughts on this set up as the project progresses and I plan on creating some useful information for small archives who are trying to digitise recordings on a budget.

In the meantime, we can all look forward to hearing – among many others – a radio programme about the Barwell meteorite of 1968 (what do you mean you’ve never heard of it?), and some firsthand accounts of fleeing Nazi Germany in the 1930s and ending up in Leicester.