Digitized audio cassettes

Oh dear. You may not enjoy this too much - my apologies for what follows, but...

jamesd37193596  wrote My organization digitized an large oral history collection. Each side side of the tape is a discrete digital file and now I want to reconnect them. I imported the MP3 files into the program and they were converted into .wav files. Can I now delete the mp3 files that are in Audition? Is .wav the default file audio type?

You digitised an oral history direct to MP3?

MP3 at best is a compressed distribution format, and not one you can use for archive purposes, as it actively throws away parts of your original materials when you digitise them, and you can't avoid this. On top of that, every time you decode and recode to the format, you make the situation worse; this causes progressive degredation.

Audition uses wav files not as a default, but as the only operating format. Wav files don't compress audio in any way; what you get is exactly what goes in, and rather unintuitively, the worse your originals are (and cassettes aren't good...) the more important it is to preserve everything that's there, so the uncompressed format is even more important.

To do a decent job of archiving is actually pretty complicated, one way or another. What you really need is to digitise directly to wav files, assemble these in Audition's multitrack view, set the mixer correctly (this may be where your silence has come from), and do a mixdown to a single wav file. It's only at this point that you would ever go to MP3 - when you want to distribute the result. Most importantly, you'll still have the original material in its digitised form - and that you don't get rid of - that becomes your new master.

To get the best out of cassettes, especially when they haven't been that carefully recorded (as happens with at lot of oral history) generally requires careful setting-up of the player, and now, careful checking of the cassettes themselves as they're invariably old and generally not well stored. You need to spool them from one end to the other and back before playing them, to reduce print-through and also to free up the internal lubricant. Also you have to do a careful check of the pressure pad unless you can use a dual-capstan machine - your best bet, generally. And then, as they won't have been recorded on the machine you're playing them on, you'll need to do a head azimuth alignment to get the best of the high frequencies out of them - which is essential if you're going to get any degree of clarity at all.