Breathing New Life into Old Audio

Once in a blue moon, I look over some of the standard non-blogged information on my site. It's all so general that I almost never need to update it. I do periodically modify the date on my resume document; however, as I'm not looking for a new job, nothing else ever needs changing.

I did try to play some ancient audio files this morning. They were originally recorded on a cheap cassette tape recorder sitting near a transistor radio. I encoded them as Real Audio files at least a decade ago. Unfortunately, that file format is no longer very cool nor even playable. Nowadays, up-to-date the software cannot even the locate old, streaming codec of that era. I knew if I wanted them to remain at all useful, I'd need to convert them.

Fortunately, after a half dozen false starts, I found a piece of free shareware called AudioVideo_to_Exe. It converted the old steaming .ra files to standard .mp3 format. The conversion did triple the file size but, of course, could not improve the quality of the sound. Still at around thirty minutes each, 14 mb files ain't bad.

I'm such an armchair archivist!

MP3 AUDIO

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1994 Radio Archive: Dubai FM, Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Educationally Yours. The HCT BBS
Mike Friganiotis, Mohammed Al-Shamsi, and Dennis Hurd. (30:06 minutes)

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1995 Radio Archive: Dubai FM, Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Educationally Yours. The Internet
Mike Friganiotis, Tonia Huculak, and Dennis Hurd (25:39 minutes)