.Wav or Mp3 files--which should I create from tapes?

Factual Questions
1

I have some 20 year old cassette tapes of music and spoken word which I want to convert to computer-usable files. I want to post the new files I create on a website. (the site is a tribute to a local singer who died years ago, and my tapes are from one of his performances.)

I’m using a freeware program called Audiograbber.

Should I create the files as .wav or as .mp3 ?

What’s the difference, and what are the pros/cons of each ?

2

Create MP3s. WAVs are much bigger* so it will take your users longer to download them, while MP3s are smaller but don’t sound as good at low bit-rates (below about 128k). But since you’re converting from relatively lo-fi tape, that doesn’t matter. For spoken word, you could use 96k stereo, maybe even mono to make the MP3s smaller still. For the music, 128k MP3 will be fine and is what people are used to.

If you want to get ambitious you could try removing the tape hiss with something like Audacity (although no doubt there are easier ways of doing it) i.e. create a WAV, run it through your hiss-removal program, convert to MP3.

  • Although WAV itself is just a wrapper format and can be used to hold compressed audio. In practice, it’s almost always used to hold uncompressed PCM audio.
3

As a broadcast professional, I recommend that you make .wav files first and save them on a CD for archiving. Then make mp3s to put on the website. You don’t want to only have a low bitrate compressed recording of these items for all time.