digitizing private media

Eugene Leitl (eugene.leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)
Mon, 23 Nov 1998 01:28:36 +0100

A whole while ago we were talking about personal data/document management. This has become especially relevant to me since I've had to move a lot in the course of the last two years -- and resources I can't access are useless.

Albeit belatedly, I am happy to report to having begun destillation of my music CDs into mp3s. It's slow, and I can't batchify it yet, but it's a start. With 128 kBit, which is roughly CD quality one averages at about 1 MByte/min audio. On a 10 GByte disk you thus can store ~160 CDs or about 7 days of audio. With a laptop, or a wearable, you're even mobile.

Unfortunately, I haven't managed in creating a capability to scan personal books whether as bitmap or using OCR in time before my next move -- a lot of books will thus have go into storage, and probably not under ambient conditions :(

Has anybody experiences in converting treekiller literature into data, particularly under SANE/Linux? (I'm not a zealot, I have FineReader and NT as well, it it's of any use).

Is it doable, or a pipe dream?

How long do you take for a single book on the average?

Did you do straight bitmaps or went for the whole hog (OCR)?

What is your storage medium?

Retrieval method?

Migration strategy to future storage media?

thanks,
'gene