 |
 |
Thank you all for the many helpful replies. Rather than reply to individual posts, I'll reply here to several. Sound Forge is a two track program. That is the beauty of it for archival work. I don't pay for multitrack capability, midi, sequencers or other features that I don't generally use. Until now anyway. Sound Forge did have pretty decent technical support. It might still be good, but since they've been purchased by Sony you have to pay for it. I I will certainly look into the other programs such as Cool Edit, Pro Tools, Samplitude and Graham's TripleDAT. ProTools is the only one of these I've used before and it has always struck me as overkill for archival work, but perhaps not. I've considered both Sonic Solutions and SADiE workstations, but unless you are a well-heeled studio, they've never struck me as very good value. I recently was getting quotes on a SADiE system and the PC that hosted it was pretty primitive without a lot of very expensive upgrades. It struck me similar to buying a car. The car seems inexpensive until you add the radio, the A/C, etc. Fortunately buying a car isn't really like this anymore. For those of you that use SADIE or Sonic Solutions, what are the advantages that make them worth the extra thousands of dollars? Obviously the software-based processes. What else? I'm afraid of being locked into one hardware/software combination, especially when I can't purchase an entirely new setup every couple of years like a for-profit studio can. And for Alyssa's comments about sound engineers. I'd like to hire one, but I think that for many institutions it is a stretch just to hire somebody at the curatorial level with expertise in audio media let alone an audio engineer. We do have an audio engineer in the library that I consult with regularly, but she works for another branch. In my experience, training as a sound engineer does not qualify one to do archival work, though audio people are not nearly as ignorant of archival issues as the video people are. (Why aren't you burning everything to DVD? I get that at least once a month.) The audio training is great for pulling cable and getting rid of ground loops all sorts of other important things that many archivists are terrible at, but an archival sound technician/engineer needs two kinds of training to do their job right. David David Seubert, Curator Performing Arts Collection Davidson Library Special Collections University of California Santa Barbara, CA 93106 (805) 893-5444 Fax (805) 893-5749 mailto:[log in to unmask] http://www.library.ucsb.edu/speccoll/pa/