State of play

[saipanda]

Hi folks,

Seems to have gone slightly quiet in the last day or two. Thought perhaps I could a try and 
sum up the current state of play on the tapes as I understand it. 

A bit hazy on some points, so please feel free to throw in clarifications, corrections, 
further ideas, etc.


1. The tapes were collected by Rocker, who is holding onto them right now. In due course, 
he will start sending them off around the country (not internationally?) for digitizing by 
those who have volunteered. Postage and packing costs will be covered by those who have 
already put their hands up for financial contributions.

Rocker, guess you need people to get in touch with you directly with their addresses (for 
sending tapes to) or to sort out getting money to you. Is this happening already? How's it 
going?

Guess it makes good sense to go with Ken's idea and start by giving every tape an ID 
number so we can keep a track on who has what. Incidentally, do we have a final tally for 
just how many tapes we ended up with?

Agree with Rocker that might be best if all the tapes are returned to him after digitizing so 
the collection can be kept together while a longterm home is pondered.


2. As agreed, digitizing for the archive should be in FLAC format. 

In the interest of standardizing things, I agree with previous suggestions that file names 
should be done on the following basis:

Peel yyyy/mm/dd (session artists)

Maybe we could add the tape ID number in there, as well as a/b to indicate the side of the 
tape, although not exactly sure of the best place to put this. At the end? For example:

Peel 1978/10/25 (Fabulous Poodles, Metal Urbain) (101a)


3. I'm not exactly sure where FLAC files will be uploaded to initially, although think there's 
been a number of suggestions. Maybe I've missed something here. There's also the 
related matter of a permanent archive. 

The size of FLAC files might make it tricky to use services like megaupload or rapidshare 
for uploads of these. Maybe a server (or bittorrent tracker) could be best?



4. As discussed before, big downloads might be tricky for some people for various 
reasons, so people (original tape converters or other list members) might want to make 
additional mp3 versions from FLAC files for uploading to rapidshare, megaupload, 
whatever. This would only be an additional thing to widen access. Whatever central archive 
is used should be FLAC files only.


5. The list should be notified of any new uploads.


6. Not exactly sure on the best thing for tracklistings in the short term. Elsewhere, I've 
seen them uploaded on txt format files to go with the music file. Think this would be fine 
as an initial thing. Perhaps if any people who do digitizing of tapes find doing tracklistings 
as well too much time/trouble, we could throw open the job for particular FLAC files to 
volunteers from the list.

Alternatively (additionally?), there's the question of a database, which would be excellent 
if it can be set up relatively easily. Seems to me it would be best to have something online 
and the simpler to use the better.


Sorry to go on at length here. I was thinking it might be good to try and bring together 
the various things related to the tapes at the moment, trying to get things clear in my own 
mind as much as anything.

Many thanks again to everyone involved in this whole thing. Can't wait to hear the results!

Cheers,

Steve W