6. Other resources: skills and time In addition to equipment, you will need particular skills if you are attempting audio digitisation yourself. Some of these skills have already been mentioned, and are summarised below. You will also need to allow enough time for the digitisation project; factors influencing the duration of the project are also summarised below. It may be that your organisation has staff who can assist in the project, but they will need advance warning and large or specialised projects may need special arrangements to be made. If such staff are not available, it may be necessary to employ someone, or to approach external agencies or companies. 6.1 Skills summary An audio digitisation project will involve the following activities: Negotiating copyright licence agreements Playback of original audio media
ranging from setting up basic hi-fi equipment, to finding and acquiring suitable equipment for playing back film soundtracks, gramophone records, open-reel tapes etc. Sound recording
setting up recording sessions for mechanical media such as gramophones and phonographs. Audio sampling and storing
researching available hardware platforms and software; setting up the computer; setting up audio interconnections to playback equipment and mixing desk; installing audio software; learning how to use software and hardware. Documentation, design and management
documenting the sound files; incorporating them into the digital resource; presenting audio to the user; web site design. 6.2 Factors influencing project duration Research time
finding and obtaining audio source materials; obtaining copyright clearance for materials (bearing in mind other recordings will need to be found if licences are refused). Preparation time
setting up equipment; familiarisation with new software or hardware; preparing source materials for digitisation. Capture time
time for playing, converting and storing the recordings. It is crucial to realise that this can take much longer than the total duration of sound you have. The time requirement will depend very much on each individual case: for example, lots of brief sound recordings may take longer to digitise than a few long ones. Allow time for mistakes, level adjustments etc. Storage time
saving audio to disk; backing up digital files. Post-processing time
editing; applying noise reduction if necessary; saving edited files. Organisation time
arranging files within the resource. Documentation time
preparing documentation; entering data. Top of Page
| 
Page last modified: by