Digitizing lecture cassettes project - Part II

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jelson

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This is a follow-up to an earlier thread from November.
A small non-profit has asked me to help them get started on digitizing their collection of lectures recorded on cassette tapes. I've estimated there's somewhere around 500+ aging cassettes: Some date back to 1990.

All were mono-recordings made on a consumer-grade cassette recording with an external microphone placed in front of the person speaking. (There are also questions from the audience, but naturally they are hard to clearly hear.)
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First, I want to thank all everyone for the extremely helpful advice they provided. As a result, the setup is component cassette deck line out to Behringer U222 into a USB port on Windows 7 machine.

The input into Windows 7 is just as good as what I hear coming from the headphone jack on the cassette deck. And so, I'm at the next phase of my project.

The person who will be primarily doing the cassette digitization is only modestly computer savy and is not up to doing much in the way of audio processing. So, I'm looking at not doing processing during digitization. Then the material will handed off to me to clean-up and polish.

My main question at this time concerns I've noticed there are not infrequent transient peaks from the lecturer hitting the mic, speaking too directly into it from time to time, etc.

So, am I thinking correctly in that
  • I should set my input in the DAW such that these transient peaks only reach to 0.5 or -6.0 dB

  • and then later, when I do processing, worry about dealing with them as well as other issues like tape hiss, the hard-to-hear questions from the audience, etc?

Again, primary goal here is simply getting all the tapes digitized. The rest can wait.

Thanks in advance for any advice. I appreciate it.

BTW, currently I'm trying Audacity 2.0.3 to save the digitization (16-bit 44.1 kHz mono) to FLAC and am also considering rayc's suggestion of WaveRepair.

Down the road, I'm looking at learning Reaper for the post digitization processing.
 
I'd be a little more conservative with input levels. Maybe -10 or -8dBFS peaks. Better to add the gain later digitally than overdrive the input. 24-bit if there's going to be any sort of post-processing (avoids a double-dose of dithering noise as well).
 
I have transfered a load of cassettes to digital over the years, what I find is that if you have the levels at about -3dB when the cassette player outputs about +3dB the levels will never go over due to the tape having already taken out sudden peaks (shouts, mic handling noise, coughs, etc) due to the tape compression flattening it out. So it the tapes output around 0 (healthy tapes would output about +1 on peaks) you should be around -5dB or -6dB on the computer. As massive said you can always boost the gain later.

Alan.
 
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