I've searched high and low but haven't found an answer to my particular question. I've recorded a bunch of old audio tapes onto my computer - some have very good quality, some of them 25 years old and with quite muffled sound. I've always been happy using HA's recommended settings for Lame and am therefore using V2 for my regular encoding of cds. But would V2 also be the best setting for old tapes that I just want to preserve the way they sound now? Thanks.

Yes, it would. If there's very little high frequency content, expect the bitrate to be lower.

Two caveats:

1. if you're happy for already poor recordings to be changed slightly when encoded, you can obviously use more aggressive settings.

2. if you want to do audio restoration at a later date, lossy files are not a good place to start.

Cheers,
David.

Thank you very much for taking the time to reply. You're right - I might go lower than V2 for these tapes. They're my late father's old tapes that I would like to preserve just for nostalgic reasons. I don't plan on doing any audio restoration on them - they're just medley tapes that I could do much better quality wise myself by using cds (he used LPs). I just want to be able to go back and listen to them easily if I feel the need someday. Again, thanks for answering.

Muffled sound in tape playback could be a symptom of a problem with head azimuth alignment. If it is possible for you to adjust this then it might be good to experiment with it.

you should be using lossless to "preserve" anything.

lossy is just for convenience, but you could always just use -V0 or -b 320 and know that the quality is the best of the MP3 format.


later

If you're a national archive with unique content, yes.

If you're talking about bad cassette copies of common commercial material, no.

Cheers,
David.

...maybe i'm being a bit picky, but "preserve" and "lossy" seem to contradict each other.

and i doubt that you need to be a national archive before using a lossless codec is a viable option, too.


later

There are two things, which he - for practical purposes - loses when encoding lossy at V2:

1. The ability to efficiently do postprocessing at a later date

2. The ability to later convert to a different lossy format, without quality loss


If he is absolutely certain, that those two points dont matter, then he has nothing to lose but something to gain by encoding to V2. If however he is unsure about one of those points, he should go with lossless.

- Lyx