Archiving Folk Recordings from Burgenland
Inside a three-year partnership with AKM and four regional museums to rescue 11,400 hours of magnetic tape before the oxide fails permanently.
The tapes arrived in a taped-up crate from a regional museum in Eisenstadt. Inside were 214 reels of quarter-inch magnetic tape, each labelled in fountain-pen shorthand, most dated between 1968 and 1983. The oldest reel had already lost its binder.
Why time is the enemy.
Magnetic tape has a half-life. The iron-oxide binder that holds the magnetic particles to the polyester base degrades in warm, humid conditions. Once the binder fails, the tape sheds its oxide on first playback — often unrecoverably. Most Austrian regional archives are currently running out of decades, not years.
"You get one transfer. If you play a failing tape on a machine that is not prepared for it, you destroy the recording and the archive in a single pass." — a preservation engineer at our Graz facility.
Our workflow.
- Environmental bake. Failing tapes are slowly heated at 50°C for 8–12 hours to temporarily restore binder integrity.
- Calibrated transfer. Two Studer A80 machines maintained in-house, with weekly alignment.
- 24-bit / 96 kHz capture. Into Nuendo with full session logging of gain, azimuth and tape speed.
- Provenance metadata. Each digital file inherits museum catalogue number, performer lineage and dialect region.
The funding model.
The programme runs on a €240,000 two-year grant from the Austrian Cultural Preservation Fund plus in-kind support from AKM. Every digitised recording is made freely available to scholars, performers and the source community — always with full attribution to the original performers.