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Digitizing tapes and texts

Printed From: FSI Language Courses
Category: Language Courses
Forum Name: Member Contributions
Forum Discription: If you have course materials and are planning to contribute them to the website, this is the place to let everyone know.
URL: http://fsi-language-courses.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=390
Printed Date: 16 January 2009 at 3:05am


Topic: Digitizing tapes and texts
Posted By: mantis
Subject: Digitizing tapes and texts
Date Posted: 02 May 2007 at 7:03am
I am curious how member are digitizing the materials.  I have a prefessional dubbing machine that produces quality sound.  I would be willing to digitize any tapes.  How are members converting the text into pdf?



Replies:
Posted By: Chung
Date Posted: 02 May 2007 at 8:28am
I used the freeware Audacity to convert the Finnish audio to MP3. I used a cable from my tape deck to the line-in connection on the CPU and recorded. The quality of the sound was unfortunately hindered by the age of the tapes. Some of the Finnish tapes sound a little muffled and this unfortunately turns up on a few of the MP3s. Garbage in, garbage out... Ermm
 
I don't have a scanner so I'm not very familiar with scanning texts, but I gather that most people use Adobe Acrobat somehow.


Posted By: Poetry
Date Posted: 06 May 2007 at 11:01am
Hi Mantis,
I'm using a pretty high quality dual dubbing tape deck (it'll record the tapes backwards on one setting).  I clean up the sound a bit and break it into tracks using Polderbits software.  Then, I zip the files into one zip file using Ace Zip.  (Some of these tapes sound like they were recorded inside a metal trash can instead of in a recording booth.)
 
The scanning is so much slower.  I have a USB scanner and "dog slow" doesn't even begin to describe it.  It's painful.  I'm considering pulling a few favors from work and finding a sheet-fed scanner (someone here suggested it), cutting the spines off of the paper-bound course books, and scanning them that way.  Of course, that won't work with the hardbound library books. 
 
Most scanning software lets you scan multiple pages into one pdf file.  Once the pdf file is saved off, you can bundle several pdf files into one pdf file using Adobe Acrobat.  I haven't gotten to that part yet.  I'm thinking that this is so painful that to make it pass quicker I may start saving off the lessons as individual pdf files instead of trying to recreate the books of 8 lessons together.  It takes so long to get one up, and I've got people waiting. 
 
And Demipuppet, who just finished the Yoruba text, has gone one step further yet.  He is scanning from library copies of the FSI courses also, and many of those are hardbound.  That means that text close to the edge of the spine on the page may or may not be cut off when you scan the page using a flatbed scanner.  He actually used GIMP to cut text letters from other parts of the book and paste into those areas to make them right.  I may end up having to do that with Luganda myself. 
 
--Poetry



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