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Here's a software program that someone told me about (Was it you, Pardek?) that sounds like it may be useful in this application. I have no idea how well it will work for this, but someone here smarter than I could surely tell you. What I do know is that it's only $69!

Syntrillium Software: COOL EDIT 2000

Here's some more information about it from Harmony-Central.com, a well-known and respected site for reviews. Syntrillium Releases ProEQ Plug-In for Cool Edit 2000

I can't believe I'm lucky enough to find this thread. I signed on to check breaking news before going to bed and this thread popped up. Cool! Since I have tons of homemade cassettes that I'd like to convert to CD's, I will be bookmarking this thread to read later.

I use CoolEdit 2000, it has worked very good for my purposes. I mostly work on getting speech material into digital format. Along with CoolEdit, I use their Audio Clean-Up plug in which is helpful if you are picky. It provides extra tools for removing clicks and pops, etc. This plug-in is not absolutely necessary since the basic version of CoolEdit comes with a noise reduction feature which is fairly good for removing run-of-the-mill background hiss.

Of course a good soundcard is necessary - I either use the built-in sound on my Mac G4 or an M-Audio Audiophile 2496 in my Windows box. I got the Audiophile card off ebay for a bit over $100 which was a great deal for a card of this quality. This place seems to have them for $159, free shipping.

My main problem is compression - realaudio and the windows media formats are good at compressing speech at very small file sizes (as low as 4-5 megs for 60 minutes at the highest compression) but these are proprietary formats which I wish to avoid because I don't want to rely on a proprietary player. Going straight to audio CD stinks because the data MUST be in 16 bit, 44100 Hz, STEREO which wastes space. Unfortunately MP3 is pretty lousy at compressing speech at low bit-rates (and making files real small). I am still looking for a good solution.

I have found a site which offers sermons in WMA (Windows Media) format and suggests some MP3 players which support this format as well, which essentially can pack about 300 hours on a single CD(!!!!). This sounds cool, but it is still a proprietary format. Here is another link discussing speech compression schemes. Basically, the upshot seems to be that MP3 is not optimized for compressing speech, and the only other options are proprietary.