Tapes Again Conference on World Affairs Recordings

A few notes about how we record the conference and why.

We abandoned tapes a couple of years ago for various reasons, among which is the fact that our numberous tape machines were all failing. Also, the quality of the recordings was much lower than we can achieve with the digitatl recorders. With the digital system we edit each and every recording to trim it to the exact size of the panel and to bring the levels up to a listenable level. With tapes we had to be right at the start and end of each panel and there was no way to improve the recording after the fact. The only problem is that it takes time to edit the recordings whereas with the tapes we just used what we had, that saved a lot of time.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is the difference between the Audio CD and the MP3 recording?

An Audio CD is just that. It will play in a standard CD player. We automatically add tracks at about 5 minute intervals to make it easier to come back to where you where when listening to it. If you put it in your computer you will see up to 16 tracks on it, a bit of a pain but you could put it into a playlist in iTunes if you wanted to. An Audio CD can only contain up to about 79 minutes so sometimes panels that went too long will be cut off at that point. About 20% of the panels go over the alloted time.

An MP3 file is a compressed file that will only play on a computer or device that can decode it. This is a typical format for sending sound files over email or downloading on the internet. When you open it in iTunes it will not have any tracks but you can scroll to a particular spot if you wish so it doesn’t need them. Because there is no end time limit the MP3 will contain the enitire panel. It is possible to take the MP3 file to iTunes (or whatever) and make a CD or CDs from it. Once recordings are in MP3 format it being much smaller (about a tenth) than an audio file, we can put a lot of them on a CD or a data DVD making reproduction much easier and cheaper, hence the lower prices for MP3 delivered files.

2. How are the panels recorded?

We use high quality digital recorders which can either be plugged into the sound boards at each location or in the absence of a sound board they contain microphones which give great recordings. Then we take the resulting file and transfer it to a computer where we edit the beginning and end so that all that is there is the panel. We also use something called normalization to bring the relative levels up so that high and low sounding speakers come closer to the same level making it more listenable in a car stereo or iPod.

3. Why don’t you put them on the internet for download?

It is harder than you would imagine when you have about 200 files to post that are all around 75 MB. I’m working on the idea. For the cost of uploading (time wise) and then maintaining them online I would have to sell hundreds of these to make it worth it and the price would have to be higher that we now charge. The cheapest way to handle these at $3 and $4 per panel, is to have you order them and we send a disc. Demand is just not high enough to justify the time and charges for online delivery. Remember the files are huge, as these events are 80 minutes long, resulting in files that are about 75 - 90 MB each. That's like two whole albums of music!

4. Why don’t we record the Jazz Concert?

In a word, copyrights. Most of the musicians involved in the Jazz Concert are licensed through some agency or other and don’t actually own the rights to their own music. Hence, we can’t sell that performance. The same is true of the Interruptus, because we would be recording sound from a movie we can’t sell that.

5. How soon are things ready after the conference?

It used to take us a couple of weeks but with the digital technology it is now a couple of days to have everything ready, and in fact, as of this writing, Sunday April 12, we are done processing and ready to fulfull orders.