Rick Fielding has recorded the past ten episodes of his weekly radio show on cassete tape, and asked if there might be a way to distribute these recordings digitally. As far as I can see, there are two methods that can be considered.

The first step, regardless, is to digitize from casette. This would most likely be done by getting some audio cables to hook a stereo system up to your computer's sound card, and recording it into a .WAV file using a sound recorder. This would create a very large file, probably around 600MB per one hour show (assuming 44,100 Hz 16-bit stereo, a fairly standard recording quality. Lower quality would yield smaller file size). Also, the recording would take one hour per show.

The next step, to cut down on the size of the file, would be to encode the .WAV files to .MP3 format, roughly cutting the file size by 1/10th, perhaps only 60MB per hour. This would be done using a program called an encoder. There are many differant encoders. One particular encoder, the free BladeEnc (one of the best), takes roughly twice as long as the audio file to encode from .WAV to .MP3 on my machine. This is heavily processor dependent; the faster the machine, the faster it can encode. My machine is a AMD K6-2 300MHz running with a 100KHz system bus and 64MB of PC100 memory.

Anyway, at this stage, we've spent at least three hours per show recording, and have a 60MB .MP3 file per show. What do we do with the .MP3 files? Once you get the file, you can play it using an MP3 player, such as Windows Media Player 6 or WinAmp, but first you have to get the file. 60MB is a large download for most people. It could be broken into smaller downloads, such as 12 5MB files, but it would still be a long download, and would require a large amount of server space and bandwidth for anyone hosting them.

The alternative method of distributing such large files is sending them on CD. This would involve someone taking the .MP3 files, and using a CD Writer to make CD's (probably 10 shows per CD) that could then be sent by snail mail. This would be quite a time consuming process. Also, the CD-R media and shipping would cost money. I think that to justify those expenses, there would have to be a fee of at least $5 per CD (10 shows), assuming that the person was willing to work for free. Including labor, a more realistic charge would be $10 per CD.

An easier option is copying audio casettes and sending them by snail mail. This would still involve money for tapes and shipping, and recording time, but would be much simpler.

The purpose of this thread is to determine 2 things: 1) If people are interested in having copies of the show. If so, please post your preference of method. 2) If someone has the ability & is interested in making the recordings and handling distribution. Hope this information will be helpful.

davidmc24