I've just begun a vinyl to CD project and it is going well. I bought Terratec's Phono Preamp Studio USB which came with Sound Rescue software.

I want to perserve my wav files after burning to CD, because I may need to burn them again and I may want to convert them to MP3 files for use with an MP3 player.

What files do I need to save?

Obviously, I need to save the wav files for each track, but with Sound Rescue I also have 1) my original input wav file for the set of tracks I've recorded 2) an output wave file that is created after cleaning up the original recording file and 3) Sound Rescue creates .awf files for both the input an output files.

I know they are big files and I'm planning to burn them as data files to other CDs for preservation, but don't know if I need to keep them all.

Any help will be appreciated,
Judith

Hi Judith.
Convert your WAV files to MP3 ( but to keep good quality I would not encode them any smaller than 192kbs ). You can store these on your hard drive or as data on a CD-R. If you ever want to retreive them, simply convert them back to WAV or if you want to burn to CD-R most burning apps will burn an audio disc straight from MP3 anyway. As MP3s are generally 10 times smaller than a WAV file you don't really want to be clogging up your hard drive with masses of 50MB+ files.
You don't need these files. Cool Edit does something similar and basically all it does is hold information for Sound Rescue about the file you are working on i.e. undo, redo, cut, paste, etc.

Hi judithanne,

Might I suggest that you save them all. Space permitting of course. Truthfully, I am not familiar with your program. However, in the programs I use, I have to save the entire arrangement if I intend to utilize the wave files later in the same program. If I save just the wave files themselves, I lose the identifiers to the software. Fine if you intend to import the track to other software.

If you choose to save only the wave files, I would probably save both the input and output files. You may want to remix the original track for some reason and/or you will still have your 'finished' track. All the best!