On Wed, 02 Sep 2009 16:39:20 -0000, Brian Gaff
wrote:

Firstly, there is no cost of postage as articles for the blind is free.
Also
if we went to digital we would ned an investment in.

A digital recording system usable by all.

What do you use at the moment? Does it never go wrong and require
maintenance?

At its simplest you could use an audio CD recorder although a computer
based system would be more versatile and allow you to edit more easily.

A copying tower

Again, your existing copying system had to be bought at some point and a
copying tower (or automated feeder to a single drive) is unlikely to be
any more expensive than replacing your existing system.

A problem is that unless you go mp3, you only get 80 mins on a cd, and we
get 90 on a tape. Tapes are reusable, and if you multiply 140 times the
number of weeks in a year, even at ten pence its a lot of money and a
lot of
completely useless bits of plastic that clutter up the environment.


I find it difficult to understand how a 10 minute difference can be a show
stopper.

You need a reusable format which can be copied fast.
it has to be reliable. One of the problems experienced by tns using cds
is
that some simply fail. Very few tapes fail as long as you are careful
that
you do not send out badly damaged ones.

Oddly enough I do short runs of CD's (between 10 and 100 at a time) for
people. I have rarely had any problems with bad CD's. Just about all the
returns have been down to the customer's CD player not liking CD-R's. I
used to do cassette duplication but I've had precisely one order for
cassettes in the last 8 years (even though the service is still listed on
my website). If I was reusing cassettes I would want to make sure that the
same cassette always went to the same customer as cassette machines can
easily damage tapes in subtle ways that you don't notice until you play
the tape on a different machine.

I would suggest that you need a list of recommended players if you go to
CD's. I had a Panasonic portable that can be operated by touch easily, it
plays mp3 CD's and it has a resume feature that works on both normal CD's
and mp3's.

Another thought is to look at mp3 players - your users would simply send
you a player which could be loaded up with the latest edition. I suspect
that a typical mp3 player might be a little fiddly to use but it would be
sensible for someone to bring out a player with decent sized buttons.

Cheers

James.

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