Arhoolie Foundation - Digitizing Project

[Tom Diamant <tom@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Arsclist,

I just joined up on this list so I don't know what has been covered
before. But I was hopipng that some of you could us out.

The Arhoolie Foundation is about to digitize the Chris Strachwitz
Frontera Collection (A large collection of vernacular Mexican and
Mexican American Music) of 78s, 45s, LPs, tapes, cylinders and other
source materials. We are working with the UCLA library and the Chicano
Studies Department there.

The first part of the project, the 78s, comprises about 80,000 minutes
of music (about 26,000 78 RPM sides). UCLA wants high resolution,
probably, 96mhz/24 bit. They would like us to put it on a removable hard
drive and send it to them as we do it and they will store it on their
server at UCLA. We will also keep a copy for the Arhoolie Foundation.

We are looking for answers or opinions on the following questions.

A. Capturing the analog sound.
1. What is a good currently manufactured turntable with variable speed
that will play 78s?
2. What is a good currently manufactured pre-amp, preferably one with
various EQ curves?
3. What is a good cartridge that accepts a currently made 78 stylus?

B. The digitizing. We would like to use a PC instead of Mac.
1. What is a good model A/D converter?
2. What is a good sound card for the computer?
3. What program would be good to use to record and save the files?
4. What file format would be best to save these in? Is there a format
that allows meta data to be attached?
5. Ideally, the Arhoolie Foundation would like to keep it's copy of a
RAID server. This would require about 1.3 terabytes. Using SCSI drives
this would be quite expensive. However, there are new IDE ATA 100 RAID
systems that are coming about that are much cheaper and are large
capacity. Do you have any knowledge about this.
6. We will also be taking a high resolution digital photo, of the source
material. In the case of the 78s, this will be the 78 label. Do you know
of a database system the would work as a good front end to manage all of
this?

Thanks forany help you can give. Please email or call if you have any
questions.

Best Regards,

Tom Diamant

Arhoolie Foundation
10341 San Pablo Ave.
El Cerrito, CA 94530
USA

phone: 510-525-7471
fax: 510-525-1204
email: tom@xxxxxxxxxxxx
web site: http://www.arhoolie.com