Getting old radio shows digitized on the PC and onto CD-Rs

May 24 00:20 UTC 2002

A Miss E Smith asks about getting old radio shows digitized:
#352 Eskarina Smith(eskarina) on Wed May 15 19:54:58 2002:
 Last weekend my parents had me clear out my old room... I found a box a bunch
 of old Dr. Demento tapes in it from 1996 and 1997... I'm a bad estimator,
 there were surely less than 50 tapes.  I'd like to be able to burn said tapes
 onto CDs, but don't have the technology myself.  Is there anyone out there
 who has the resciources and would like to help me on said project?

I send back a requested e-mail asking about a plan:
Do you have a cassette deck?  for playback
Do you have a PC with sound card?
Do you have a cable to connect cassette deck to sound card?
Do you have an audio editor on the PC to take in the external sound?
Do you space on the PC to take in the files?  The initial .wav files
for one Dr. Demento show comes to near 999megabytes.
Do you have an MP3 encoder program?  at 128kbps the resulting MP3 is
96MB, at 192kbps the resulting mp3 files are 135MB.
Do you have a CD recorder?  CD R recording software?  
Would it be worth it to upgrade your current computer with a CD-R
recorder.  Internal drive from $75 to $150, external drive from
$90 to $200 (requires USB port).
Where does the technology trail end?

I divide Dr. Demento shows into 9 parts, the first hour has four
segments (between the commercials), the second hour 5.
To find out what is on the tapes look at the unofficial Dr. Demento
web site.  Use 'Dr Demento' in a search engine, or try:
http://php.indiana.edu/~jbmorris
Down the page is link to show playlists by year.  Each year link
presents a calendar of Sundays.  Take a look around.  If you know
the first show on a tape, you can find the week it was played by
manual search or Jeff's playlist search engine.

The work may have already been done.  ZacksStacks is the official
archive site for Dr. Demento shows, but is off-line at the moment.
www.comedycorner.net is another source, take a look aroudn and 
only make one connection for ftp.comedycorner.net to download any
show.

I have about 33 percent of the archive at this time, put 1996 
and 1997 are poorly represented at this time.        x^but

I am currently archiving 1987 and 1988 Dr. Demento shows, adding
to the national archive and trading with a number of others who
have to collect them all.

Any questions?

I thought we would use this item to track the progress.
Also gather any other questions, suggestions, software, hardware
used.  Etc.

I now had digitized my tapes of Dr. Demento from July, 1987 to
February of 1988.  They will be the first editions of these
shows into the national archive.