8 track cartridges were a very popular domestic audio format in the United States, although there were also sold in the UK and Europe. The growth of the 8 track was synonymous with its use in car industry, as it allowed people to listen to music on the move.
Although phased out in the early 1980s as CDs became increasingly popular, the 8 track retains a cult following, as demonstrated by this video which takes a virtual tour around the 8 track museum in Dallas, Texas, USA.
Screenshot of software encoding a file to MP3 used at the Great Bear
After we have migrated your analogue or digital tape to a digital file, we offer a range of delivery formats.
For video, using the International Association of Sound & Audiovisual Archives Guidelines for the Preservation of Video Recordings, as our guide, we deliver FFV1 lossless files or 10-bit uncompressed video files in .mkv or QuickTime compatible .mov containers. We add viewing files as H264 encoded .mp4 files or DVD. We’ll also produce any other digital video files, according to your needs, such as AVI in any codec; any MacOS, Windows or GNU/Linux filesystem (HFS+, NTFS or EXT3.
For audio we offer Broadcast WAV (B-WAV) files on hard drive or optical media (CD) at 16 bit/44.1 kHz (commonly used for CDs) or 24 bit/96 kHz (which is the minimum recommended archival standard) and anything up to 24 bit / 192 kHz. We can also deliver access copies on CD or MP3 (that you could upload to the internet, or listen to on an ipod, for example).
Why are there so many digital file types and what distinguishes them from each other?
The main difference that is important to grasp is between an uncompressed digital file and a compressed one.
On the JISC Digital Media website, they describe uncompressed audio files as follows:
‘Uncompressed audio files are the most accurate digital representation of a soundwave, but can also be the most resource-intensive method of recording and storing digital audio, both in terms of storage and management. Their accuracy makes them suitable for archiving and delivering audio at high resolution, and working with audio at a professional level, and they are the “master” audio format of choice.’
Why uncompressed?
As a Greatbear client you may wonder why you need a large, uncompressed digital file if you only want to listen to your old analogue and digital tapes again. The simple answer is: we live in an age where information is dynamic rather static. An uncompressed digital recording captured at a high bit and kHz rate is the most stable media format you can store your data on. Technology is always changing and evolving, and not all types of digital files that are common today are safe from obsolescence.
It is important to consider questions of accessibility not only for the present moment, but also for the future. There may come a time when your digitised audio or video file needs to be migrated again, so that it can be played back on whatever device has become ‘the latest thing’ in a market driven by perpetual innovation. It is essential that you have access to the best quality digital file possible, should you need to transport your data in ten, fifteen or twenty years from now.
Compression and compromise?
Uncompressed digital files are sound and vision captured in their purest, ‘most accurate’ form. Parts of the original recording are not lost when the file is converted or saved. When a digital file is saved to a compressed, lossy format, some of its information is lost. Lossy compression eliminates ‘unnecessary’ bits of information, tailoring the file so that it is smaller. You can’t get the original file back after it has been compressed so you can’t use this sort of compression for anything that needs to be reproduced exactly. However it is possible to compress files to a lossless format, which does enable you to recreate the original file exactly.
In our day to day lives however we encounter far more compressed digital information than uncompressed.
There would be no HD TV, no satellite TV channels and no ipods/ MP3 players without compressed digital files. The main point of compression is to make these services affordable. It would be incredibly expensive, and it would take up so much data space, if the digital files that were streamed to televisions were uncompressed.
‘Every so often I’ll get the proper CD version of an album I’ve fallen in love with as a download, and I’ll get a rude shock when confronted by the sense of dimension and spatiality in the music’s layers, the sculpted force of the drums, the sheer vividness of the sound. The difference between CD and MP3 is similar to that between “not from concentrate” orange juice and juice that’s been reconstituted from concentrate. (In this analogy vinyl would be ‘freshly squeezed, perhaps). Converting music to MP3 is a bit like the concentration process, and its done for much the same reason: it’s much cheaper to transport concentrate because without the water it takes up a lot loss volume and it weighs a lot less. But we can all taste the difference.’
As a society we are slowly coming to terms with the double challenge of hyper consumption and conservation thrown up by the mainstreaming of digital technology. Part of that challenge is to understand what happens to the digital data we use when we click ‘save as,’ or knowing what decisions need to be made about data we want to keep because it is important to us as individuals, or to wider society.
At Greatbear we can deliver digital files in compressed and uncompressed formats, and are happy to offer a free consultation should you need it to decide what to do with your tape based digital and analogue media.
The main work of Greatbear is to make analogue and digital tape-based media accessible for people living in a digital intensive environment. But once your tape-based media has been digitised, is that the end of the story? Do you never need to think about preservation again? What issues arise for information management in the future, and how do they relate to our actions in the present?
This year (2013) the National Archives in the UK are facing a huge challenge as the ’20-year rule‘, in which the government will be releasing records when they are 20 years old, instead of 30, comes into effect. A huge part of this process is the digitisation of large amounts of material so they can be easily accessible to the public.
What does this have to do with the digitisation of tape you may be wondering? Well, mostly it provides food for thought. When you read the guidelines for the National Archives’ digitisation strategy, it raises many points that are worth thinking about for everyone living inside an information intensive environment, professional archivist or not. These guidelines suggest that many of the problems people face with analogue media, for example not being able to open, play or use formats such as tape, floppy disks or even digital media, such as a cd-r, do not go away with the move toward wholesale digitisation. This is summed up nicely in the National Archive’s point about digital continuity. ‘If you hold selected digital records that are not yet due for transfer, you will need to maintain their digital continuity. This means ensuring that the records can be found, opened, understood, worked with and trusted over time and through change’. This statement encapsulates the essence of digital information management – the process whereby records are maintained and kept up to date with each technological permutation.
Later on in their recommendations they state something which may be surprising to people who assume that digitisation equates to some form of informational omnipotence: ‘Unlike paper records, digital records are very vulnerable and will not survive without active intervention. We cannot leave digital records on a shelf in an archive – they need active management and migration to remain accessible in the long term.’ These statements make clear that digital records are just as vulnerable as their analogue counterparts, which although subject to degrading, are in fact more robust than is often assumed.
What is the answer to ensuring that the data we create is usable in the future, is there an answer? It is clear on whatever format we choose to archive data there is always risk involved: the risk of going out of date, the risk of vulnerability, the risk of ‘not being able to leave them on the shelf’. Records, archives and data cannot, it seems, simply look after themselves. They have to adapt to their technological environments, as much as humans do.
In 2012 Greatbear digitised a selection of audio and audio-visual tape for the Heritage Lottery Funded exhibition, Music & Liberation.
The first job was to migrate a short film by a feminist film making collective called Women in Moving Pictures who were based in Bristol in the early 1980s. The film shows how the Bristol Women’s Music Collective were using feminism to politicise music making and includes footage music workshops, group performances interspersed with self-defence classes and intimate conversations.
Film still from ‘In Our Own Time’
Several copies of the film had been stored in the Feminist Archive South, including the master copies. Out of curiosity the U-matic copy was initially digitised, before the original was migrated to high definition digital format.
Film Still from ‘In Our Own Time’
Another job digitsed a series of rare recordings on tape, donated by Maggie Nicols. This included rare footage of the pioneering Feminist Improvising Group, whose members included Sally Potter, Georgina Born and Lindsay Cooper. One of the tapes was originally recorded at half speed, a technique used to get more recording time. We used the Nakamichi 680 Discrete Head Cassette Deck to play back the tapes at the correct speed to ensure the highest quality transfer.
We also digitised a series of tapes from the open improvisation collective Maggie co-founded in 1980, Contradictions. This included the performance ‘Madness in a Circle’ and many other creative experiments.
Music & Liberation re-opens at Space Station Sixty-Five in London for the last four days of its UK-wide tour on 10 January, so if you want to listen to the music or watch the films make sure you catch it.
We have recently been digitising Betacam SP (‘superior performance’) video recordings, a cassette based component analogue format that is used extensively in the broadcast world. Betacam SP offered fantastic video and audio quality from its introduction in 1986, and a very similar digital cassette, Digital Betacam, is still used now.
Betacam SP was commonly used throughout the ’90s and ’00s and was not threatened with obsolescence as many older formats are. However Betacam VTR machines will soon become very hard to find spares for, thus becoming another threatened video tape format. Luckily at Greatbear we have every type of Betacam machine (PAL and NTSC) available, as well as spare parts (such as head drums), so we are able to migrate analogue formats to digital so they can be utilised by current media practitioners.
The tapes that have inspired this post are public domain tapes from the National Archives in the USA. They feature the tension filled politics of the Cold War, including footage of President John F. Kennedy, missile silos, Stalin, B29s taking off, graphics of the Iron Curtain, air raid warnings and people running into shelters. Collectively they give a powerful impression of Cold War international relations from the perspective of the American government.
The tapes were sent to us by renowned investigative journalist Paul Lashmar and were the raw material for his BBC Timewatch programme Baiting the Bear: How the real life Doctor Strangelove brought us close to Armageddon, aired in 1996.
Paul has covered many of the main news stories of the past 30 years related to terrorism, intelligence, organised crime, offshore crime, business fraud and the Cold War. He has written for newspapers such as the Independent on Sunday, the Guardian and the Evening Standard, is a regular TV and radio broadcaster and a lecturer in journalism at Brunel University.
We were recently contacted by Frank Whelan of the Comhaltas Regional Resource Centre who wanted us to digitise a recording of the Fleadh Cheoil traditional music festival in Buncranna, Co. Donegal in 1975.
Frank sent us an EIAJ ½ inch video that was recorded on a Sony High Density V-60H video tape for Helican Scan Video Tape Recorder. The tape was suffering from binder hydrolysis (often referred to as sticky shed syndrome), so needed treatment before it could be played. The tape was incubated and cleaned before the digitisation process.
The recording contains fascinating footage of solo and group performers from the biggest traditional Irish musical festival in the world. The first Fleadh Cheoil took place in 1951 and has happened every year since. Comhaltas are currently collecting archive material for every year the festival was held in order to create a document for future generations. The digitised film will go towards an exhibition and will be stored in a research facility focused on Irish traditional music.
This is an excerpt of the film that Frank kindly said we could use on our site.
We’ve been a bit quiet since last year on our blog here primarily because we have been processing a large, ongoing audio archiving digital migration job for Mood Media Ltd
In essence audio archiving, digital migration, transfer or digitisation, whatever term you prefer, is conceptually simple: one analogue or digital format is moved to another, usually digital, format. It is in the details of this process that things can get complex – requiring experience, specialised tools and often custom-built solutions.
This job has many factors – not just attaining the best analogue transfers, but also addressing the organisation of such a large amount of 10.5″ reels, their digital management once migrated and the creation and management of metadata.
The archive, dating from the 1950s up to the early ’90s, even though it had been stored in less than ideal conditions, is in generally good condition. An interesting and often fantastic-sounding collection of recordings and music are evident all recorded at 15ips in mono, stereo and some encoded with Dolby A noise reduction.
There are specific issues with some tapes that are not uncommon with older audio tape:
Binder hydrolysis or sticky shed syndrome (SSS) has affected a significant proportion of the archive in particular Ampex branded tapes from the 1980s onwards.
Some glue used in spices from the 1980s spreads over time and tends to stick layers of tape adjacent to the splice together. This can be a very frustrating problem which rarely damages the tape permanently, but affects the tape tension on certain sections so that head to tape contact is momentarily lost and a very obvious audio glitch noticed.
The analogue side is important to get correct initially but the management of the data is critical with such a large number of reels and individual artists and tracks. Each batch of tapes would be catalogued in a .csv file. The digital audio transfers were split into individual tracks which then had to be renamed based on the data in the .csv file. This was handled by some php coding which matched the metadata supplied with the files, checking for inconsistencies then renaming the .wav files on one of our servers.
This type of customised workflow can be tricky to setup initially and find the balance between accuracy and speed but once done a smooth workflow is possible maintaining high quality, accuracy and value.
We were contacted recently by Jack Hawkins, the renowned arranger and band leader to consult on and digitise personal quarter inch open reel recordings of his band.
In case you don’t know, The Jack Hawkins band are probably best known for their performance of the track 30-60-90 made famous in a club sequence in the 1971 film Get Carter starring Michael Caine.
We’ve been honored recently to have won a large contract to help in the digital migration of an extensive educational video archive by the transfer from U-matic archive copies to uncompressed video files.
While the archive had been stored in an suitable environment and rarely if at all played, they had not survived well. The Sony branded tapes from the 1970s and 1980s all exhibited binder hydrolysis or sticky shed syndrome. We were still able to get good transfers though using our range of U-matic machines, particularly the Sony BVU-950P and For-A Time Base Corrector.
Over the last 12 months we’ve seen this side of our business grow and adapt to the range of transfer needs that individuals, businesses and media creation organisations have.
We are able to support a wide range analogue and digital, consumer and professional video formats from the late 1970s onwards such as: Betamax, VHS, SVHS, VHS-C, Video 2000, 8mm, Hi8, U-matic, Betacam, miniDV, DVCAM, etc.
We offer straight video transfer to DVD and a higher quality transfer service to DV or uncompressed AVI which can then be supplied on hard drive, edited, encoded to a very high quality DVD or supplied on digital tape.
We pride ourself on our positive, friendly service and are happy to give advice over the phone or by email. When you call us you won’t be stuck in a voicemail system or told we’re an internet company so don’t like speaking on the phone!
We’ve recently been proud to be regularly involved in the transfer of a range of rare and often unique recordings of great but often forgotten Bristol bands from the late 1970s onwards.
“… aims to showcase music from the diverse Bristol Music scene and provide a historical account / document of all things Bristol that should never be forgotten. Many of the artists and releases are rare, unknown or never before released. The material has been lovingly digitally remastered from vinyl, ¼ inch tape, dat or cassette. The original vinyl releases would generally have been limited to runs of 1000 copies or less.”
Many of the recordings have survived well over the years and sound great, a testament to the bands and the engineers that recorded them.
15 inches per second (ips) and 7.5 ips speeds are normally transferred on, our pride and joy, one of two Studer A80s. We also have a Tascam BR20 and several Revox A77s for backup. The slower speeds and 4 track mono stereo formats are catered for by Teac and Sony machines.
30 ips, 15, 7.5 and 3.75 can also be transferred on our Sony APR 5003.
We take pride in making sure these machines are calibrated and cleaned before each transfer.
Quite often we receive tape in poor condition, frequently a result of splicing tape ‘drying out’ as it’s a bit like sellotape and the splices breaking as the tape is played.
We are able to clean, resplice and repair tape before transfer.
Prices are competitive but not published here as we’ve found each job is different and needs certain attentions that need to be quoted for on an individual basis. We are happy though to offer an assess / listen service, as many customers don’t know what’s on their tapes and either don’t have a machine or their old machine is broken.
Recent work has included many valuable family history 5 inch reels. Remember tape is fragile, very susceptible to magnetic fields and doesn’t last forever. It’s worth transferring it or getting it transferred now to keep your memories safe.
You can see a more comprehensive list of all our audio equipment in our studio here:
