There are a couple of technical areas I think should be addressed before a major effort is made in making copies.  I have not done much with music files on the computer but as one of the people who will be responsible for handling the files in the office.  It’s possible those who have more experience already know the best approaches to address my concerns.

First, what media do we want to store the digital recordings in?  I think the answer is one copy on a CD or DVD as a back-up and one copy on the office computer hard drive or external hard drive.  My concern with CDs and DVDs are both the lifetime of the individual disks and the future of the media itself.  That is will the CD we write today be readable ten or twenty years from now and will people have ready access to a device that will read a CD ten or twenty years from now?  If you look at the history of analog recorders and digital media you will note that these things change rapidly.  

This probably means we need to have a plan to update the library to new formats when they come along.

The second issue is the file format.  There are at least three in popular use now MP3 (not proprietary), AAC (used by Apple with a copy-protection scheme added) and WMA (Microsoft proprietary with copy-protection).  Each of these have a choice of sampling rates that contributes to the quality of the music.  MP3 has seems to have a short term advanatage because it isn’t tied to a specific company and "everyone" has MP3 players.  However, is it the best long term choice?   

Are these easy questions with clear answers or do we need to consider some of these in depth before starting build a digital library?

Are there other topics such as how to or if to clean up the noise and enhance the sound quality of the recordings? 

Ken Landreth said:

Rich…Please post esch of those pictures on this forum for comment in separate posts.  I suspect each photo will initiate a nice discussion thread about the musicians….and I suspect Kilby Spencer can fill us in pretty well on the picture of his parents with Albert Hash …..Ken 

I’ll try to post some of these photos later.

The photos I added to the journal were submitted by Jeff Weaver.  I think that they are all on the New River Notes Photo Gallary.  He has about 4200 photos at http://photos.newrivernotes.com/ You can search the site for names in the captions.   

Unfortunately the URLs to the photos change anytime a photo is added so we couldn’t add links to specific photos from this site.  However, we could use small copies in this forum and could probably get permission to use some of the photos as a part of a Grayson Heritatge Foundation project.

There won’t be much information on these individuals in the journal and I think it would be nice for some of the experts on this forum to provide the rest of us some more information on these performers. Photos include one of Albert Hash with Emily Spencer and Thornton Spencer; the Ballard Branch Bogtrotters; Wade Ward; and
Samuel Francis Russell. Russell was born in Grayson and moved to Marion as an adult. I think the rest lived most of their lives in Grayson.

You can listen to music from the CD, read Joe’s liner notes, and order the CD (and all of the others in this series) here:

 http://www.virginiafolklife.org/recordings/crookedroad.html