So, I just watched the video of Steve lecturing at MTSU and he says, quite definitively, that there is no way to archive digital recording. I know this is true regarding the filetypes etc. of programs such as Cubase's '.cpr' files and whatnot, but if each of the channels is exported as .wav, any program and any future program can import it, no? .wav been around since audio on the PC started and doesn't seem as though it's going anywhere any time soon. Couldn't it be the digital equivalent to tape? And the programs the digital equivalent to all the types of analog multitrack recorders?

Or one step further, if you export each channel as .wav and quite literally record it onto multitrack tape, wouldn't that make it equally as archivable? The point he brought up about digitaltape(?) oxidizing and losing the data etc. may have been valid but what about exporting all the channels as .wavs and hosting it on some server, or putting on an external hard drive and keeping it in the same place you'd keep the multitrack tapes?

Not trying to pick holes or anything but I'm having a hard time understanding how digital can not be archieved 'forever', and if anyone could give some serious insight to why this is, without regurgitating what the man himself said in the video, that would be super.

Thanks

To archive something electronic you need to believe that there will be some machine in the distant future 50 years - 100 years that will be able to read it.

With tape you had a standard system of machines and tape. You had that for a long period and there is a lot of that standard equipment in phyical existance that will read the media and will do so if it is turned on 100 years from now. If the media is well stored all should work well. Spool it up turn it on and go.

With digital things are not realy standardized nor are there archival materials. CD's last for about 5 years. Back up tapes are fine but you need a tape player and software that will run on a future os. DLT machines I used to back up digital information can no longer be used as they were scsi interface and the software would not correctly run on any of the present os. This is 10 years ago, archival would be thought of 50 - 100 years at least. Presently most digital info is just being ported around waiting for a intert large scale digital storage system.

Also if you export the tracks as wave you could consievably open them up in a machine 100 years from now that has software that sees a wave file as by that time wave files will be many times replaced by other standards. Then load them into a music program that will still recoginizes whateaver (for that time very low) resolution wave files. There is little reason to believe Wave files will still be with us in 10 years.

Think about having those files on a Jaz drive 100 years from now and you begin to feel the problem. Or for that matter imagine having comidore music files on 5 1/2 flopies now.

This is ridiculous. Why can't you archive onto a hard drive, stick it in a bomb shelter, and just maintain some computers that will run the files? For fuck's sake, you can get USB 5.25 floppy drives these days. This is not an impossible endeavor. Files don't just corrupt themselves if you take them off an operating system and double-check their functionality. Barring a high-powered EMP the hardware should be fine. Bomb-shelter backup, bitch.

Oh, and I was never here and you didn't see me. And no I'm not Frank Decent.

Big John wrote:CD's last for about 5 years.

There is little reason to believe Wave files will still be with us in 10 years.

Or for that matter imagine having comidore music files on 5 1/2 flopies now.

The first two sentences are crazy. Even the cheapest shittiest CDRs I bought in the 90's lasted a good 5 years. Decent CDR's last longer than that. C'mon.

The reason to believe that wav will be around should be obvious to anyone who understands what wav files are. Digital audio in a raw, non-system-specific, non-devicde-specific format. It'll be around and supported forever unless there is a concerted effort to kill the format maliciously by Big Brother or something, and even then, people will keep it around.

About the C64 reference... aside from the PC/Windows format being *WAY* more of a planet-wide computer standard than C64 ever even came close to, if you really have those C64 floppies, all you need to do is hit up eBay and pick up a C64 plus disk drive and monitor. Looks like $100 is what you can expect to pay.

So yeah, be realistic here.

PCM (wav) won't be going anywhere. As long as you can store it on a medium with some kinda longevity, you'll be fine. And *that* is where the issue lies. Upload it to your web server and your buddies web server, store it on a physical hard drive, and burn it to DVD. that should cover you for... X years. until both your web server and your buddy's web server are wiped out, and your hard drive fails (let's face it, that happens plenty often) and your DVD is physically destroyed or becomes unreadable. I can't guess X with any certainty, but I bet it's at least 10. possibly 50 or 100, though you'd certainly end up copying things around before the 50 year mark.

whatever. if your music is important enough that the world will need (or even be interested in) your master track tapes, then you should be recording analog. either that, or have a permanent staff of people that will keep current copies of all your shit and keep refresing them and staying redundant and everything.

All my old CDRs from the late '90s still play just fine, at least as of a few months ago. I'm interested to see exactly how they'll disintegrate over time. Does anyone have first-hand experience with this? Glitches? Tracking problems?

when they first started selling spindle cd's, like 50 or 100 per spindle, I bought a spindle of the cheapest ones they made. those are the ones where after about 5 years, some of them started malfunctioning. audio cd's would have a rythmic "chick-chick-chick-chick" sound over the whole thing, and data cds were totally or partially unreadable.

that's the last time I had that happen though. everything since then still works, even right down to the first CD I ever bought back in the 80's.

5 years is a total, total bullshit number.

Yeah I second all of the pro-digital comments here. Previous, small scale formats that are now obsolete never achieved a fraction of the dominance that a .wav or .aif now has. The only way these will become obsolete is if we suddenly stop using computers or recording music as a species, its almost as crazy as suggesting that AC electricity will become obsolete. Once you have an entire planet pretty much satisfied with a protocol, its not going to disappear easily. That's the only comment by Steve that I have struggled to see the logic behind, if it was a sonic preference I could understand, but so long as we still have computers, drives and power, there's no way a wav will become unreadable due to technological advance.

zartoid wrote:so long as we still have computers, drives and power, there's no way a wav will become unreadable due to technological advance.

Do you agree that there is more to a session than a single .wav file?

For example, the digital equivalent of a multitrack master is the protools session. Within that session can be a bajillion tags, edits, plug-ins, settings, etc. that are not a .wav file.

Do you see how having 100 raw unedited, uncorrellated .wav files will give you nothing like what you need to remount a session on whatever future audio engine you decide to use?

But yeah, a single .wav file, if you have a bunch of copies of it and you regularly check them for error and migrate them to storage that contemporary computers can access, yeah you might be able to keep that alive for a while.

Is anybody doing even that?

zartoid wrote:Previous, small scale formats that are now obsolete never achieved a fraction of the dominance that a .wav or .aif now has. The only way these will become obsolete is if we suddenly stop using computers or recording music as a species, its almost as crazy as suggesting that AC electricity will become obsolete,

I can imagine DSD or an equivalent format overtaking PCM as the primary format for digital audio in the medium term. I do however agree that PCM will probably be a digital audio format that can be played back and easily transferred for some time. An area of doubt is over the likelyhood of hardware to read digital media remaining readily available. How long before the ATA interface is forgotten by the ever advancing computer industry and hard drives that use it become difficult and expensive to access? How long is a piece of string?

Unfortunately the computer industry isn't driven by ideals of cross platform compatibility and hardware with a long and renewable lifespan. It's driven by constant advance, planned obsolescence and a hardware replacement cycle of a few years. Digital audio is a small part of the computing industry and it piggybacks on whatever technology is widely available at the time, which makes its future unpredictable. I don't think anyone would argue that it's impossible that legacy drives might be readable in 100 years, but it seems a lot less likely than being able to play back a well stored tape using a machine that you could, if necessary, build at home. I saw a home made tape machine today in fact.

Big John wrote:With tape you had a standard system of machines and tape. You had that for a long period and there is a lot of that standard equipment in phyical existance that will read the media and will do so if it is turned on 100 years from now. If the media is well stored all should work well.

Is this not largely the case for digital, as well?