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KOATV - Apr 23, 2008 - 9:47 am

Hi!

I'm currently involved in backing up cassettes of old radio programs I used to be on about 15 or 16 years ago to CDs. My problem is that the files have gone around 989 MB per side & I was thinking of burning them to DVD-Rs.

My question is whether the DVD-R would work in normal CD players in homes & cars before I do any burning (as I'm digitizing in my Final Cut).

If the DVD-R idea won't work, what are my options? Each side of tape goes approx. 30-45 minutes and I wanted to have a good quality burn of each individual program on an individual disc.

Thanks!

kerby - Apr 23, 2008 - 3:43 pm

Hi Sameer, thanks for using macosx.com.

To answer your first question, no, DVDs will not be read by regular CD players. There are some applications where DVDs are used to store audio, but those are usually for surround sound mixes and are very specialized and need special players.

Once you have the tapes ripped to your computer, you can experiment a bit with getting them to fit on a CD because you have the original files on your computer.

I would look into using iTunes to convert your files (AIFF I am assuming) into MP3 or AAC files. Since they're just radio programs, you are not going to have CD-quality files to start with, so you shouldn't be able to notice the compression that MP3 files use. I would try something like 256 AAC files to start off with, and then work your way down until you find a size that lets them fit onto a regular CD. You might even be able to use something like Apple Lossless files, which generally reduce the size of the file by about half.

You can find the encoding/compression settings in iTunes preferences under the Importing tab of the Advanced tab. You can select your tracks in iTunes and select "Convert Selection..." in the Advanced menu to encode the tracks.

Hopefully that should get you started. Let me know!

-Kerby

KOATV - Apr 23, 2008 - 4:02 pm

Thanks, I'll try it out. BTW, a friend of mine told me that CDs are mainly dependent on content length as opposed to file size, is that the case? (if you're making an audio CD that is)

kerby - Apr 23, 2008 - 4:10 pm

Yes, you might have noticed on the CD that they say something like "80 min, 700 mb), which has to do with how data is written to the CD if it's an audio-cd or a data cd. So if what you want is less than 80 minutes, you should be OK. I would just test it out in iTunes and adjust things until it lets you burn.