Music storage

I think this is the right forum for this.

Over the past few years I have recorded some live concerts of local bands onto DAT. For long term backup, (since I don't have a reel to reel) I was going to transfer to computer. My question is-- should I record the music in to 32 bit .WAV files with Cool Edit or something similar and then leave them that way and store them in data format on CDR's or should I convert them to 16 bit .wav and make music CD's.

Let the opinions begin!
Thanks

 

I would encode to FLAC after creating wav's (its lossless and can go higher than 16 bit) download it here:
http://www.mikewren.com/flac/

For tech specs on FLAC go here:
http://wiki.etree.org/index.php?page=FLAC

You can always make Audio CD-R's at a later date. I think the you have to downsample to 44.1hz for audio, which means you'll be losing a bit of the info from the DAT which is a bit higher.

This is a good utility for correctly splitting the wav file into tracks; better than internal editors on something like cooledit:

http://www.homepages.hetnet.nl/~mjmlooijmans/cdwave/

 

Sounds good. What do you see as the advantage over .Wav? The open source nature? The way that it is frame independent unlike .wav or what? Any problems using this?

 

The FLAC files only wrap the .wav and make it smaller, useful if you have a 110 min concert that will compress to about 59% of its original size and go on one disc.
Keeping it as data, not straight .cda keeps the integrity better.
Converting it to a losslessly compressed archive, and burning it as a data disc would allow you to burn audio copies at will, while retaining a 'master' file to go back to rather than transferring from DAT all over again.

Just my opinion. SHN and monkeysaudio are also popular formats. I log a lot gold CD's I don't want to risk playing all the time in this format.