How To Preserve You Ministry's Tapes - or Why You Should Pay Someone To Do It For You
Why is this an issue? Well, I had been receiving tapes from a friend's church near Nashville. I love the pastor. He says it like it is, and I like that. I was getting cassette albums from years past. I noticed that the quality was iffy. After talking to my friend there, I called the pastor to offer my help. I told him that I would transfer his library to CD for him. The library would take up less space, and would have an increased life span. CD-R copies would cost less than cassette copies, and there would be virtually no preventive maintenance expenses for CD burners. So, that is another service that I will offer now, I guess.
"What should a church record to?" I would recommend an Alesis Masterlink ML-9600. Retail is $1700, street price is $700. I will not give a full review of one here. I will tell you that I have one myself, and they are great for church recording. The Masterlink appears to be a dedicated audio master recorder, that prints to CD-R. Well, it is in away. Unlike any other device, it has a hard drive. The new models come with a drive that allows for 30+ hours of recording time to the hard drive. After recording to the drive, a Red-Book CD's may be burned. Red Book means that it has a Table of Contents (TOC), and is the same standard as all commercial music CD's. It will play in any CD player. A CD-R does not have a Table of Contents, and relies on a computer, or a player with software to access the files. The Masterlink would allow the average pastor to record 30 sermons on the drive before having to burn a disc. Go to www.alesis.com to learn more, or contact me and I'll give you more info.
The other options are a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) or a CD-R unit. A DAW would allow you to maximize your resources and provide multitrack recording and mixing functions. The DAW would allow for editing, adding intros, outros, etc. A DAW can also allow for time compression and expansion. If your pastor is long winded by a 5 minutes, that 5 minutes can be compressed to fit in to the limits of the CD, without affecting the pitch of his voice. Boy, if only we could do that in our brains.
Should you decide not to begin recording onto a Masterlink, DAW, CD-R, please consider how and where your tape is stored. Tape has a life span of about 10 years. The cheaper the tape, the less life it will have. If your tapes are playing fine after that amount of time, that is great. I would recommend playing it safe, and transferring the most important tapes onto CD.
"But there's hundreds of tapes!" I had a question asked of me. "Is it possible to play a cassette tape at double speed, and record it digitally at double speed, to save time?" The big answer is, "NO!" Why not? It sounds logical.
In the cassette machine there are filters that operate to ensure that there is fidelity at the normal speed. There is also a phenomenon called "head bump." Head bump is an physically induced EQ curve, which affects the low end. By speeding the tape up, frequencies are lost. All frequencies on the tape double, exceeding the limits of the circuitry. The head bump also moves up.
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