[johnfowles]

Originally Posted by jj

good luck with the conversion project, the thing could be condensed in length but all need to hear Burton's segment, lol

you'd think i was all digital but i still am Analogue Jim whenever possible...I captured it pretty much in "Fowles capturing Face of Thousand People" fashion ie) just old audio recorder capturing AM transistor via household air ...am doing same now with Fan590

I realize John was a reel to reel guy but in the end, same crackly quality...but good enough...we're all staying tuned, thanks all for effort and once again for the original headsup

Well now that demands an answer from, me
When I first used my little battery operated reel to reel machine to make some historic GL audio recordings
1 It was all I could do to afford it in the first place
2 It was very nice and portable
3.I checked the inevitable wiki and read
"Philips introduced the compact audio cassette medium for audio storage in Europe in 1963, and in the United States in 1964, under the trademark name Compact Cassette."
Certainly when I bought my R to R machine in about 1967 a cassette recorder would no doubt as new technology have set me back about $100 (I do not even recall seeing one at that time and it was not until 1972 that I bought my first bog standard monaural Phillips cassette recorder for I guess about $110,00 in the UK;

about 10 years later my first Sony Walkman (the first one with a built in FM radio) set me back about 90 pounds (say in those days $140.00) and amazingly of the 6 items made by friggin' Sony that I brought here in 2000 it is the only one still working , but that is a long and ultimately sad story. suffice to say except for consumables like blank CDs and tapes I have vowed never to buy anything bearing the 4 letter swear word "Sony" ever again!!
Now a comment about audio spoken mp3s.
You can in fact get away with a very low sampling rate, whereas audio mp3s need a minimium of 96 KBPS to sound reasonable, and 192 or even 256 is preferable I have here a floppy disk containing a single mp3 of 0.99MB.It is of an Australian Broadcasting Company broadcast from January 2007 concerning the Nevil Shute Gathering we went to in "The Alice" the following April.this mp3 runs for 4 minutes 21 seconds because the sampling rate is only 32KBPS. a 192 KBPs music mp3 would be proportionally six times larger i.e. nearly 6 MB
The calculation of mp3 file sizes is part of one of my ambitious ongoing tutorial projects, however I cannot readily find the formula , so I'll post this and return tomorrow