[peel] State of play

[Jimmy]

I've just ploughed through over 200 Peel group e-mails since my return
from holiday (Disney Florida, hard work) and now, finally, I'm up to
date. My, you chaps have been very busy :-)

I'm obviously too late to pledge my £20 but please mark me down for
helping with the postage and packing and any other incidentals that
may crop up

I'd just like to agree with a few suggestions that have been made so
far and maybe add a couple. 

Try and get the best initial transfer. Sound cards are not all created
equal. 
Inspect the tape for problems, take up slack, fast-forward both sides.
Make sure your tape deck is up to scratch, heads cleaned and
demagnetised. 
Adjust azimuth for each tape, it does make a difference. (I'll stick
Dimes tutorial in the file section)
If your system and sound card have optical connections, use them. 

File formats and archiving to flac have been adequately covered by
Alasdair and Steve W, which saved me time and effort by covering them,
thanks. I'll maybe add some comments in a further reply.

Archives are better secured if copies are kept in different locations
therefore I suggest that the digitisers keep a copy of the flac/tx/md5
files intact when they return the tapes and include a copy to Rocker
and a further copy to a third person. This would also help out
whenever the torrenting is organised, as 3 full copies will be
available right from the start which speeds up distribution. 

Another point to note is that 400 C90 tapes would be roughly 200Gb in
flac format so make sure you have enough space available. It also
equates to 600 hours and I'd guess that at least a couple of reviews
will be required so make that 1800 hours. It's a big job. Who's up for
project managing?

Cheers
..Jimmy

Just remembered, postage of the tapes should be Special Delivery.
Expensive but the PO generally take extra care when you pay the premium!