The baking of tapes to stabilise the oxide is a specialist job. I've just sent some of mine up to UK's North West Sound Archive to be dealt with.

Archiving to mp3 is not the best idea as it is a lossy compression process with the emphasis on the loss. Although they sound OK, when you try and copy them later, there is a significant degradation.

The Paul Graney Archive was archived to 44.1K 32 bit WAV files, twice the quality of a CD. The archive medium is DVD and the longevity of that is questionable. I have the original digital media on hard drives (2.5 terrabytes) and will probably raise some funding to copy the lot across to new media in the next decade. In the meantime, I just have to hope that the server behaves, we don't have a fire, etc.

One way to help preserve the recordings is to share them. There's nothing like sending them into the ether to ensure that they echo around for years to come. I know there are copyright issues sometimes but .......

Johnny Adams
Paul Graney Project