Best way to mark tracks of old family recordings?

[TimArends]

In Audacity, I have marked the tracks of some old family recordings with the name of each person speaking. I would like to save the audio so that the identifications will remain years in the future. Is the best way to do this by splitting the tracks into separate (aiff) audio files? Any way to keep them in a particular order?

[kozikowski]

That is the embarrassing elephant in the room, isn't it? I know what you have in your mind and the computer industry is determined to not to let you do that. All digital storage is fugitive. Given not all that much time, whatever you put the songs on is going to die and take your sound with it. Sometimes, it's aggressive. I have many backups on Floppy. Remember floppies? I have to maintain computers specifically so I can play those disks -- and almost all of them do still play.

All home recorded DVDs and CDs use the technology of color photography. Remember seeing those orangy faded photos grandma has in the drawer? Those are the dyes in the CD and DVD. We had data backups for our telephone system on a recorded CD. It looked like there was no dye left at all when we dug it out, but we did find one (1) computer that could play it. I think that was ten years.

So given that the original premise of the question is impossible, there is a provision inside Audacity to export your labels as a text file so you can print the cut titles on the outside of the Storage Media (usually a Music CD). Music CDs do not carry track information inside the disk.

If you were deadly serious about this, you can contract a CD pressing company and they can create a glass master and aluminum pressings like commercial CDs and other long life data disks. Those should go a good long time. You need to hurry up on your decision because nobody buys physical CDs any more, so the pressing companies are going out of business.

Koz

[waxcylinder]

Koz' advice on archival and CD/DVD life are well put - and for longevity of storage his advice is sound.

But back to your original question: yes you can create a label at each point you want to identify the start of a speaker. To facilitate keeping these in the right order I would suggest labelling the track titles thus: 01 <speaker_name_1>, 02 <speaker_name_2>, 03 <speaker_name_3> etc. Then use the Export Multiple to create a set of WAV files at 44.1kHz, 16-bit PCM stereo (the Red Book standard for CDs)

This labelling schema would then presents them in correct order for my CD burning s/w, RecordNow - and even if yours doesn't default to an alpha-numeric sort order - then you should be able to re-order them manually, easily guided by the numbering included in the filename.

If you import the CD into iTunes you can then use the iTunes print fuction to create a CD jewel case insert with the track listings.

The only minor problem this gives me is when I also export MP3s (or create AACs from them in iTunes) - when I then need to edit the metadata tags, but not the MP3/AAC filenames, to remove the 01, 02, 03 etc.

If you don't want to go to the lengths of using a CD pressing company, then I would suggest that you use external USB disks or memory sticks to backup at least two different copies of the WAV files you have created. As this is presumably irreplaceable data then I would strongly suggest creating one copy which is held "off-site" at a friend's house or your office etc.

WC