[peel] transferring tapes

[ROGER CARRUTHERS]

My 2p: it is, of course, largely a matter of
preference ie. whatever sounds good to you. You tend
to get an awful lot of opinions when you open this
particular can of worms!

 At 128k, I can definitely hear unpleasant artefacts
added by the encoding process - high frequency sounds
eg. cymbals & hi-hats, sound 'smeared' and there is a
general loss of clarity.
Having said that,  192k is OK for material that
started off life on a cassette, as the starting
bandwidth is limited anyway.

 For 'quality' recordings - reel-to-reel or DAT - it's
worth the effort (imo) to go up to 320k VBR or use a
lossless format. 

 Many trading sites still insist on using lossless
compression (.shn, .flac etc.), which is nice if you
can spare the bandwidth, but not so clever if you're
on a slow connection.

 For my ears, you get better bangs per buck using Ogg
Vorbis compression, than you do from .mp3 but
inevitably you have to bow to market pressures, and
most people want .mp3, because it's more widely
supported..

 Whatever rate you chose, it's definitely a good idea
to use some form of compression if you intend sharing
the files, especially if the original recording
quality was less than spiffy; uploading uncompressed
.wavs of cassette recordings doesn't really make a
great deal of sense (even though we love you for
sharing anyway :-)
cheers
Roger