Justin Foley wrote: Wed Sep 04, 2024 9:31 pmRADAR 24 thread nearly 20 years ago

I read through the remnants fairly recently and just want to plug how usable and great the archive is still, even despite the condition.

(I’m not making an analogy to digital archiving, but I feel like I’m in there all the time.)

The sad part about the RADAR format is that it actually was a dedicated professional recording platform and not a box of software you also browse porn on. Maybe with maturity some of these long term concerns could have been addressed, but digital is always a race to the bottom of faster/cheaper/more convenient and it couldn't compete. I believe this model of own nothing/subscription-based everything will one day come back to bite us in ways beyond recorded music.

penningtron wrote: Thu Sep 05, 2024 6:44 am The sad part about the RADAR format is that it actually was a dedicated professional recording platform and not a box of software you also browse porn on. Maybe with maturity some of these long term concerns could have been addressed, but digital is always a race to the bottom of faster/cheaper/more convenient and it couldn't compete. I believe this model of own nothing/subscription-based everything will one day come back to bite us in ways beyond recorded music.

Radar was a solution perfect to maneuver people who came up recording to a tape machine directly through a console into the digital domain. It was a 1:1 stand in for a Tape machine and could be dropped in place of one with minimal alteration of your workflow, and you could mix out of it just as you do on tape. If you wanted to sync 48 tracks of orchestra recording to a tape machine it might have been the most stable way to do it. Shit got weird when you actually had to hire an editor to actually edit on one using a keyboard. I only saw it in real life once and it looked like a nightmare, but the dude was pretty fast. Once people moved to Radar and were comfortable with Digital as a thing, it wasn't too much of a hop over to Protools and the explosion of the plug in market was a hell of a siren song. Radar was kinda doomed from the start from a longevity standpoint, but I think it was a pretty rad idea and still kind of an appealing one. A used Tascam or Alesis 24 track recorder can be had for next to nothing and I've thought about it, if you can convert to modern hard drives, because I think they are made for IDE or evan SCSI.

Text on a computer is digital. Text in a book is analog. Digital does not mean reproduce-ability; I have two 1/4" machines and can make copies all day of tapes.

Text in a book is digital. If you copy the text, letter by letter, you copy the book. The 1/4" machines make analogue copies which unavoidably degrade with each copy made.

Consider this game:



They don't do this in the experiment, but I think if the drawing had included a line of text, then the line of text would still read the same at the end. That's analogue vs digital.

The rest seems to be covering ground we already covered and I don't really know what to add except to say it again. To say that common file formats won't be inaccessible in future, the 2050s won't be doing things the same way as the 1950s, and any consideration of data management in future which doesn't mention AI is already stuck in the past. If you don't take high-speed internet into account, that's talking about a world that is already long gone.

I don't think looking at how other data is stored as an "analogy". It's a pretty big claim to say that the archival format for music in the decades to come is going to be on analogue magnetic tape, while absolutely every other form of data in every other industry will be digital. Writers aren't printing out all their writing in paper form to store in a filing cabinet. Filmmakers aren't printing all their edits to 35mm reels for safekeeping. All over the world, in all kinds of industries, people are dealing with more complicated data than a recording session and as far as I'm aware nobody has decided that printing that data to analogue tape is the way to go.

Actually I doubt that many people making music are printing things to magnetic tape any more either.

If you think that the text in a book, as in the ink on the page, is a digital representation of the words, then I understand why we can’t come close to agreeing.

What you’ve just said is objectively, and categorically false.

it’s weird seeing a kind of argument in the Tech forum.

That other industries have also been wooed by ephemeral digital formats (for cost, laziness, the usual reasons) is not evidence that tape isn't a proven storage medium for recordings. Film isn't my world but I wonder if there are industry equivalents of Steve Albini, Walter Sear, etc.

The text thing as an.. analogue to digital recording is too ridiculous to even unpack.

llllllllllllllllllll wrote: Thu Sep 05, 2024 6:23 am

Justin Foley wrote: Wed Sep 04, 2024 9:31 pmRADAR 24 thread nearly 20 years ago

I read through the remnants fairly recently and just want to plug how usable and great the archive is still, even despite the condition.

(I’m not making an analogy to digital archiving, but I feel like I’m in there all the time.)

The fate of RADAR sorta proved the point regarding proprietary digital multitrack formats.

One thing I would say in digital's favor...

If you have a playable CD of an album, you have a serviceable digital master and can make clean vinyl records from it.

Is it going to sound as good as a new master made through modern converters off an actual master? No.

But it works. A lot of reissues we buy in stores today are cut off CDs, especially albums made in the early to mid 90s.

It's a nice feature of a much-maligned format that has gotten a lot more palatable to me as pro digital audio improved and the quality of consumer-grade CD players went up, over the last 15yrs or so.

I still buy most everything on LP but I often also buy the CDs when I can find them for cheap (and they're usually cheap if I can find them at all).

Making records, I don't care if it's tape or digital as long it's a good signal chain and I have the mixed record on a 1/2" tape with a bunch of digital backups in various places.

Just use digital recording at this point. Analog is over.

TylerDeadPine wrote: Sat Sep 07, 2024 1:19 am it’s weird seeing a kind of argument in the Tech forum.

Oh, I haven't been paying attention so it's a slower-moving one than in the past. It's always the same argument though.

If you think that the text in a book, as in the ink on the page, is a digital representation of the words, then I understand why we can’t come close to agreeing.

What you’ve just said is objectively, and categorically false.

You're probably right about us never agreeing about this. If you can't understand what I'm saying here then you don't understand the difference between analogue and digital information. And everything I've said about information theory and mathematics will just be whooshing straight past. The qualities of the ink, paper and typeface have no bearing on the information content of the book, which is encoded in the letters, and which can be reproduced perfectly by copying the letters. Hence, we still have copies of books written thousands of years ago. What I am saying is objectively, and categorically, correct. Text is digital information. Digital is not a synonym for computer.

Film isn't my world but I wonder if there are industry equivalents of Steve Albini, Walter Sear, etc.

There are people like Steven Spielberg who, while they accept that 35mm film is a dying medium, still like to shoot on it because that's what they've always done and that's what they like to do. And he can afford it. Then there's others like David Lynch who decided "fuck that, it's the art that's important and digital is cheaper and better" and gave up shooting on film years ago. But I don't think there's many people silly enough to think that 35mm film is a good archival format. It's notoriously unstable and has a habit of spontaneously catching fire.

When you say "other industries have been wooed by ephemeral digital formats" though, understand it's ALL other industries. As well as the music industry too. It's all industries. It's all information. Skipping over "ephemeral" since I already talked at length about how popular digital formats have stuck around for many decades. Nobody thinks analogue tape is the best archival format for storing anything in ANY business any more. I understand some people here decided a long time that analogue tape had been declared the winner for all time, but the opposite has clearly happened. Even in the music industry.

But why so emotionally attached? I don't talk about this emotionally, I think it's an interesting topic, but if I talk about it on here people always get very upset. I think part of it has to do with feelings about time, impermanence, change, the eventual destruction of all things, and wanting something stable to hold onto, to reassure us that the things we create have permanence... but they don't.