Reel to Reel Tape to Digital, CD/DVD questions

[zeyeman]

I am concidering putting a collection of Live traditional music on DVD as a way to digitize it for future use and to make sure it survives the mylar tape it currently lives on. I have a 9600(233HZ)  with 256 M ram running on OS 8.6.
I have several questions about the process of converting reel to reel tapes to digital.
1. What can I expect in terms of minutes of tape running time to CDs or DVDs as data files and is saving them as data files the best way to preserve them for later possible editing. Much of the tapes are 7" reels and I am guessing they were recorded at 3.25 or 7.5 IPS.
2. Will the 9600 I have do the job.
I am sure I should be asking questions that I am not knowledgeable enough to know I need to ask. I am a preforming musician with good mac skills but no specific mac CD or DVD burning experience. I have a LaCie cd burner and will probably need a DVD burner if I preceed.
3. Will Toast be a good program to use to burn these tapes to digital.
Any help will be most appreciated. I have not decided for sure if this is a project I want to tackle and I would appreciate any suggestions available. I don't want to do this project unless I know beforehand that there is a good chance of success in a reasonable amount of time.
Thanks
Sincerely
Dick Zion
dzion@radiks.net
Zeyeman

[kelly]

Hello Dick. Welcome to the Forum.

Which version of Toast do you have?

Toast 5 Titanium includes CD Spin Doctor. It can be used for this purpose.

http://www.roxio.com/en/products/toast/index.jhtml

[iain]

Hi Dick

Your 9600 should be fine. I have previously used the onboard audio of a 132Mhz 7600 to record. Still use this machine, upgraded to G4 for multi-track work.
Average 3.5 minute stereo track would be about 36MB in its raw format.
As for burning- what Kelly said.

[Al]

Zeyeman, welcome to Techsurvivors!  

You can use a freeware program called "Coaster", it can be found at versiontracker.com and will take your audio and convert them directly to disk as AIFF files.

What you will need hardware wise is a RCA to stereo 1/8" phono jack adapter, which can be located at Radio Shack.  Plug it into your MIC input of your Mac and the reel to reel to the RCA plugs of the adapter.

Make sure you go to your sound control panel and change the input to the MIC input and you should get a sound reading when you play the reel to reel.

I'm wondering if you wouldn't mind archiving the songs as high quality MP3s.  At a bit rate of 192kbps.  You would sustain some loss in quality when reconverting them, but should play well as files.  And you will be able to hold about 90 to a 110 3.5 to 4 minute songs on one CDR.  You can do this if you have iTunes installed.  iTunes 2.0.4 is also available at versiontracker.com.  Requires OS 9.0.4 and better.  Or if not with itunes you can convert the files to MP3 with a program called SoundAppPPC which is also located at, you guessed it, versiontracker.com.

[kelly]

Hi Dick.

My Personal Message was acting odd when I tried to respond.

So I'll just post here.

My experience with this is having used Spin Doctor on my MDD G4.

I'm sure there's others who could help with your 8600 recording questions.

Good luck.