Is this a good way to make an audio DVD?

[Des]

I have a client with hours of lectures (their own lectures) on cassette tape. They would like them archived onto as few disks as possible and they are OK with audio DVDs.
Since they have to be played back in real time I was considering running them into a DVD recorder instead of capturing them to the computer and then making an audio dvd.
Any downside to the straight to recorder method?

They don't need them to be cleaned up or enhanced or anything, and the quality of the recordings I have heard so far is actually quite good. The goal here is to archive to conserve space first and then usability a near 2nd.

Thanks,

--dES

[AlanHK]

Any downside to the straight to recorder method?

Depends on what format it's using.
Presumably MPEG2 with AC3 audio.

If so then there is an overhead, perhaps a very large overhead, of the blank video.
I guess you'd get maybe 3 or 4 hours of this per DVD.


Most DVD players, and any PC, can play a data DVD full of MP3s.
That will give you about 78 hours of MP3 at 128kbit/s.
Use a higher rate if you don't have that many hours.

Plenty of MP3 recording apps: MP3DirectCut is one. Very simple, streams directly to an MP3 file.

Or if you do want to clean them, Audacity. I've ripped cassette to MP3 using that, after using its filters to remove hum and hiss.

[Des]

Thanks AlanHK, I hadn't thought about recording direct to mp3. I think that if I set up a playlist that would work perfectly for her, as one cassette per mp3. She can probably load it onto her iPod much easier that way as well to play for a class.

--dES

[jagabo]

If you want to record on DVD -- set the DVD recorder to 6 or 8 hour mode. On my DVD recorder 6 hour mode still has AC3 at 256 kbps. At 8 hours it drops to 128 kbps. But even that is probably fine for voice recordings.

Another thing to consider: will the DVD recorder record without a video signal? You may have to feed it video from a camera or something.

[jman98]

It's not free, but Audio DVD Creator can create a valid DVD by displaying an image while the audio plays. This saves you ton of wasted space on encoding bogus video you don't need.

Simply encoding to MP3 may meet your needs as I think you have discovered. I do have one suggestion. I'd avoid VBR and just go with CBR. Space savings on VBR audio are minimal over using CBR and it just introduces the possibility, even if unlikely, of VBR related playback issues. Please keep your sampling rate at 44.1 or 48 KHz though. Some morons encode audio at 22 KHz and it will have audible artifacts if you do that.

[Des]

It's not free, but Audio DVD Creator can create a valid DVD by displaying an image while the audio plays. This saves you ton of wasted space on encoding bogus video you don't need.

Thanks jman98, I originally thought about using something like Audio_DVD_Creator, but I'm also trying to keep the number of steps and computer time down. That would require me to capture the audio to the computer and then have the DVD Audio program reconvert it to make the disk. This is where I felt the stand alone DVD recorder would be better.

Now I'm leaning toward recording with MP3DirectCut as AlanHK suggested and creating a playlist for each tape.

Thanks for the tip about VBR. I think I'll use 192K CBR for these.

I have a little time before I need to start this project and I continue to be open to suggestions, this is just the way I'm leaning now.

--dES

[AlanHK]

Now I'm leaning toward recording with MP3DirectCut as AlanHK suggested and creating a playlist for each tape.

Note that you need to get lame_enc.dll and copy it to the MP3 DirectCut folder.
See Lame_MP3