PART II – Digitising Magnetic Tapes

In part II of his three-part series, professional audio engineer Thomas Blakemore shares useful information to help us digitise our family’s oral history

Feature photos courtesy Thomas Blakemore, bar image page 52 David Blum, and laptop

In part I of this article, we examined how to best store and protect oral histories that are on magnetic media for the long term (or at least to slow the degradation process that naturally occurs with this technology). Now, we’ll turn our attention to getting that information from the tape into the digital world.

Copying your recording, the right way

You may ask, ‘Well, why can’t I simply make a copy of the original onto a new tape – that should last for another thirty years, right? Yes, you could do this, but there are two problems: first, machines to play the tapes are becoming harder to find as time goes by, and there’s no guarantee that in another 15 or so years you will be able to find a machine at all.

Second, with analog audio, every time a tape is copied it introduces an additive generational loss to the copy: more noise is built up due to the noise inherent in magnetic tape (tape hiss), and any small speed variations of the tape machine will be added to with each subsequent copy that is made.

Why a digital copy is the solution

To protect the information for the long term, you should digitise your tapes as soon as possible. Every day wasted in taking this step is one day closer to permanently losing the content. There are two ways you can go about doing this: send your tapes to a company that performs this service, or digitise them yourself.

Use a service or DIY?

You can easily find many companies that perform this service by searching the internet. Be sure to communicate with the service of choice before sending your originals to make sure that they accept tapes in your format and to check for any special mailing requests that they may have. The service should assure their playback machines are wellmaintained and are regularly cleaned and aligned. Sending your tapes to be digitised is quite often the easiest solution to preserving your family’s oral history, providing you are dealing with a reputable company (check user reviews online) and feel comfortable in parting with your original recordings.