The most unavoidable loss with high-speed playback of cassettes is that introduced by the tape deck's playback head.

Alas, you failed to mention any budget or quality concerns. Since there are such huge quantities of material, I can only assume that quality is of little importance, as long as the end result is plain and intelligible. you could even use a network share and write a script to encode when a file isnt written to anymore.Įven better yet, find one big lecture class, and pass them out as extra credit, for anyone who'll rip them. as for the encoding, use some mass encoder.

bind this to 4 keys, and you'll easily be able to control 4 streams.Īssuming that you have a thousand tapes, thats about 40 days worth of playtime, and so this method should take 1/4 to 1 day to complete the ripping. Or, you could set up a macro program, and bind one key to save an existing wave file, and open a new one. I recall either a built-in feature or some plugin that allows you to split a wave file into segments based on noise thresholds, just set this to maybe 30 seconds of silence to split the tracks up. make them listen continuously, each computer writing one big file for each stream.įind yourself 40 tape decks, and either use them at normal 1x speed, or use the above solution for cutting your sample rate in four to accomodate a 4x playback. now, run 4 copies of soundforge on each computer, each one listening to a different sound input channel. set up maybe 10 of them, each with 4 soundcards. To check your recording's quality I'd recommand baudline () maybe there are encoders that have an equalizer simmilar to the mp3-players? you may have to compensate these with some filters. Of course this totally ignores any frequency dependant effects in the path from the magnetic media to your computer. If it works out halfway useable then you could try and get one of those 96kHz/24Bit-soundcards, that should yield about 12kHz Bandwidth (96kHz recording, 24kHz encoding -> 12kHz BW) which should be more than what you could expect from a normal analog audio-tape. Of course that would limit your Bandwidth to about 5000 Hz but I'd give that method a try to check the feasibilty of that method. Now the encoded mp3 should have the correct speed and frequency again. wav file at 44100 Samples/sec and then encode it with your favourite mp3-encoder telling him that you have a 11025-Samples/sec (=44k1/4)recording. Then just grab the signal from the playback-deck and feed it in your soundcard. Then lets assume that your fast-dubbing-tapedeck runs at four times the normal speed.

Let me assume that those lectures are not hi-fi recordings and as such you could live with half or a quarter of the audio-bandwidth of your soundcard.

Audio cassette to mp3 converter