Creating Digital Audio Resources : A Guide to Good Practice

This guide is intended as a basic "how to" for those wishing to use audio materials in the creation of digital resources.

It is not intended to be an exhaustive manual, but it should help those considering audio digitization to assess the scale of their project, and to acquire an understanding of the main issues involved.

Individual chapters cover issues such as: copyright law and the way it affects digital resource creation; dealing with analogue audio media including records and cassettes; choosing equipment, and the strengths and weaknesses of various common computer platforms including Apple Macintosh, PC: Microsoft Windows, PC: Linux, PC: BeOS; a step-by-step guide to creating digital audio files; information on some of the ways sound can be presented to users, considering downloading sound from the Web, audio streaming, data compression and presenting sound from CD-ROM; and the development of a strategy for preserving your digitised audio, both in terms of backing up the data and of maintaining support for file formats in the long term.