If enough people are interested, I'll ask the powers-that-be at the BBC about archives of GMR Sounds of Folk. At the moment I am recording the desk output onto minidisk which I then chop into tracks and burn onto CD as a personal archive.

It's a bit iffy with copyright, but I don't sell the CDs - the studio team all get a copy, and so does our studio guest.

I keep the recordings in MP3 format as well as WAV, and find that three months' worth of MP3s will fit on a CDRom complete with playlists at 128k sample rate.

This would be quite a big overhead for BBC GMR, as the hard disk allocation where the ROT (recording of transmission) is stored isn't very big, and everything is already in MP3 format. This storage also looks after programme trails, news items and jingles.

Sounds of Folk (and most other programmes) is kept for a week before being overwritten by the current broadcast, so there are no archives. However, we are able to request permission for archives to be kept of specific broadcasts if we are able to provide a good case...