What to do with old FSGW concert tapes?

Subject: RE: What to do with old FSGW concert tapes?
From: Charley Noble
Date: 21 May 09 - 08:31 PM

Pat-

Hang in there. What you have is a potential gold mine!

And it does need to be transfered into digital media.

Cheerily,
Charley Noble

Subject: RE: What to do with old FSGW concert tapes?
From: johnadams
Date: 21 May 09 - 08:20 PM

Digitising this much material would be a major project. The archive which I now direct in the UK was of a similar size and took 18 months for one project worker to transfer. This was done with funding from the UK lottery.

Paul Graney Archive and again

What information comes with each tape. I'm assuming that your collection has minimal information included as to what is actually on the tapes ie. Artist, and date recorded. Maybe you have track listings? I don't know what FSGW stands for but presumably it's one venue or festival or whatever. If so, were the concerts ever reviewed in a paper or magazine? That might give clues. Otherwise your only options are to quiz people's memories and organise a sampling session.

Tapes and digitising are one issue. Metadata is always a bigger one.

Subject: RE: What to do with old FSGW concert tapes?
From: PatMcGee
Date: 21 May 09 - 07:18 PM

Hi Nick,
   Well, making digital copies of 500 or so tapes would take quite a while. And someone would have to buy a couple of big disk drives. Not to mention several hundred hours of someone's time to do all the work. I hoped to avoid doing that except for concerts where someone who remembered it thought it would be a good one to review for publishable material.

   And of course that just puts off the decisions of what, if anything, to publish and how to publish it. I think I'd rather make those decisions sooner than later.

   Anyone else have ideas?

Thanks,

Pat

Subject: RE: What to do with old FSGW concert tapes?
From: GUEST,nickp (cookieless)
Date: 21 May 09 - 05:31 AM

I think that whatever the long term plans, and assuming you have the technology, you should make a digital copy - preferably in WAV format rather than MP3. That way you keep you options open. I'm not sure what format the LoC would use. The odd things I've listened to have been in MP3 and therefore 'lossy' - once it's gone, it's gone.

If space becomes an issue you can convert WAV to FLAC (that's another discussion) which is 'lossless' and takes up less space. Some more recent sound packages will play FLAC direct but you'd probably want to convert them back as required.

That will give you time to consider. Have fun.

Nick

Subject: What to do with old FSGW concert tapes?
From: PatMcGee
Date: 21 May 09 - 12:01 AM

I'm sharing my dining room with a treasure trove: 17 tubs of reel-to-reel tapes of FSGW concerts, dating from the early 1960s to the early '90s. FSGW has tentatively agreed to give them to the Library of Congress, and the LoC has tentatively agreed to take them. I hope to make this happen soon.

Before the tapes get to the LoC, should I try to do something else with them?

I've talked with several people about this. Some think we should make one or more compilation CDs, maybe by theme, maybe by decade. Some think we should make smaller digital tracks and sell them through some web site. Others think that the amount of work involved, especially finding artists and negotiating permissions and royalties, would be great enough to make the whole idea a non-starter.

So, here's my basic question: Would enough people find this interesting enough to make it worth the effort?

What do I mean by 'interesting enough'? I'm not quite sure, but I know that it includes finding enough people to volunteer to do all the various parts of the work and then finding enough people to buy the product.

And the next question: If it's worth the effort, what would be the best product? Compilation CD? A bunch of CDs? A bunch of iTunes songs? Some podcasts? Something else?