Yes you can get 5.25 flopies but if you saved your music on a non microsoft pc good luck opening the disk or running the files in the origional programs.

All of you cdr's work fine that is good. You must be fortunate as the national standards bureau tested and found that most should not last much longer perhaps you have stored them in a dark dry place. Perhaps you just lucked out. It is not my supposition that they will fail but the testing agency of the goverment. I have floppies that no longer work. You get people using cd - dvd polishing kits and armorall on em.

Do you think there will be cd drives in 50 years on ebay. Why do you think that the wave file will be a standard forever or as long as mankind has computers. No other standards have remained in place that long.

Try to open a 1995 avid file. Avid is still standard and you will go through hell opening old files a lot of times you can't. Try opening a Word document from the late 1980's. Try opening any number of word processing documents from before then for example Word Star was the most popular word processing program in the goverment for a time most of the files can not now be read. People are working on it though.

I work on the national roundtable of digital archivists and have to hear others discuss the sound issues. I have no personal agenda on sound files. I work with video and animation files. Everyone is working on a xml as a solution but seems like it may not work.

As far as machines go you might do it on a mac or a pc then you have the dozens of music programs you might have used. Of course you might load the wave files into a program but then you would not have the automation or eq information. Oh yea if midi was used what was it running. This is not a universal playback system. If you take any 24 track analog you can probibly run it on any 24 track machine. There are some varables like if dbx or dolby was used on it but that will be noted on the track sheets or the box if the engineer was deicent.

In avid you have lots of little scenes and audio. All to often it does not come back togeather again in a later version of the program.

In Maya puting a file back from the many 3-5 programs of the 90s is crazy hard.

A big mongster xml tagging system to record what the files are and how to re - create things may be on the way the goverment is spening billions on this thus far nothing is done but if it does work and was not a total waist of time you will have xml tagging and recreation tagging that should be put standard into all these types of programs at some point in the near to distant future.

We've dicussed this before, and I think the bigger question surrounded the media. Certainly converting .wav files is relatively simple. But to be fair we don't always just use .wav files and that could lead to problems if rarer codecs are used (even DSD might not gain popularity).

Saving sessions of random files which are unassociated time-wise is asking for trouble, but that could be avoided.

Regarding archiving digital data for music, yes it is done, and professionally, but it costs money and I'm not sure if people would want to cough up for that. On the other hand, I'm not really sure how many people on the whole are really bothered about having a future-proof copy of their multitracks or mixes. But for what I'd regard as "important" material I think it's morally the right thing to do for a recording engineer who has the ability to decide to do so.

there are emulators to run basically any oldschool computer format that you may have used, at least as far back as the C64 in the 80's. they have disk drive emulators too. so that argument is silly, even if you ignore the fact that nobody ever used a C64 for multitrack recording.

disk drive bus protocols like ATA and the like are irrelevant, since they make USB adaptors that provide those busses (i own one and like it just fine), so that argument is silly.

as far as your argument, Steve, about a "single wav file", that's not what anybody would actually do. the two primary ways a sensible person would archive their session would be

A) to archive every single wav file, which contains all the relevant audio plus all the non-relevant audio

or

B) to have every virtual track exported as a single wav, comprised of all the edits/crossfades that may have been enacted on all the punched sections, etc., with leading silence so they all start at the zero mark

in the case of A, it's way more being preserved than in the case of your multitrack tape, but it's a fucking bear to recreate the session without that data file (protools. cubase, audition, whatever proprietary format it is) since you'd have to recreate all the edits/crossfades yourself, and have to determine the correct offset times for all the tracks. it would be ugly, but it's certainly possible and once your band goes multi-platinum and somebody actually has a reason to go back to your old recordings 50 years later.

in the case of B, it'd be a piece of cake to build a session from it in any future format, and you'd have exactly the same level of audio preserved as you do with a multitrack master tape.

the only argument that holds any water, that I've seen so far in the numerous discussions we've had here, is the one Steve's made previously about how nobody takes the time and effort to keep refreshing harddrives and maintaining digital copies in multiple media. it's labor intensive and probably not worth it for 95% of the music that gets recorded.

Free software rant:

All of this file format nonsense is the result of people accepting proprietary, closed source, software as the only option. There are mountains of computer code written as far back as the 50's that are still totally usable. It was only in the 80's with the growth of cheap home computing and the shysters interested in making a buck off of it that this became a problem. If someone should want to recover any of the work I have done in the distant future they will have a publicly documented file format to work with. If for some reason that is ambiguous they will have the source code for every piece of software used.

Rapidly changing, proprietary file formats are only a problem if you choose to let them be.

projectMalamute wrote:Free software rant:

All of this file format nonsense is the result of people accepting proprietary, closed source, software as the only option. There are mountains of computer code written as far back as the 50's that are still totally usable. It was only in the 80's with the growth of cheap home computing and the shysters interested in making a buck off of it that this became a problem. If someone should want to recover any of the work I have done in the distant future they will have a publicly documented file format to work with. If for some reason that is ambiguous they will have the source code for every piece of software used.

Rapidly changing, proprietary file formats are only a problem if you choose to let them be.

Free software is definately cool, but when was the last time you did a mixdown/edit session with Audacity?

scott wrote:as far as your argument, Steve, about a "single wav file", that's not what anybody would actually do. the two primary ways a sensible person would archive their session would be

A) to archive every single wav file, which contains all the relevant audio plus all the non-relevant audio

This is the default of any protools session not specifically prepared for "archiving."

or

B) to have every virtual track exported as a single wav, comprised of all the edits/crossfades that may have been enacted on all the punched sections, etc., with leading silence so they all start at the zero mark

Yeah, nobody does this. It would be better, of course, but nobody does it.

the only argument that holds any water, that I've seen so far in the numerous discussions we've had here, is the one Steve's made previously about how nobody takes the time and effort to keep refreshing harddrives and maintaining digital copies in multiple media. it's labor intensive and probably not worth it for 95% of the music that gets recorded.

Nobody does anything but put the hard drive with the session on it on the shelf. You can talk all you want about potential ways around data impermanence and file obsolescence, but when presented with a long-term expensive regimen of rendering, marking, documenting and then copying and re-copying for all eternity, just about everybody says, "yeah, I ought to do that," and then puts the hard drive on the shelf.

That's what's good about a reel of tape, you can just put it on the shelf and have century-plus archival permanence.

D'Piucchstre wrote:

projectMalamute wrote:Free software rant:

All of this file format nonsense is the result of people accepting proprietary, closed source, software as the only option. There are mountains of computer code written as far back as the 50's that are still totally usable. It was only in the 80's with the growth of cheap home computing and the shysters interested in making a buck off of it that this became a problem. If someone should want to recover any of the work I have done in the distant future they will have a publicly documented file format to work with. If for some reason that is ambiguous they will have the source code for every piece of software used.

Rapidly changing, proprietary file formats are only a problem if you choose to let them be.

Free software is definately cool, but when was the last time you did a mixdown/edit session with Audacity?

I've never used Audacity for anything.

When was the last time you actually looked in to what was available outside of corporate controlled software?

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

I call bulllshit. I have cheap burned CD-Rs that are way more than five years old and still play well.

Good points all round. My reference to the wav format was implied with a subtext of "archived session" but I admit I didn't make that clear. A rogue wav is still a more valuable chunk of data than session data, but I'd go as far as saying that the current leading DAW apps are almost as ubiquitous, and perhaps just as unlikely to become obsolete. As for archiving, I certainly do, and if I upgrade platforms I seem to keep the old one around for a few years. I also used to work at FX Rentals, London where the busiest department was FX Copyroom, with ovens for baking tape and hardware to play back almost any format, and yep, most of them popped out as wavs in a protools session.

Steve, you are correct in the sense that a tape will not ask you to locate missing files or plugs etc, but the practice of archiving sessions with a view to future-proofing is only slightly more taxing than filling out a session sheet and marking the tape box, so if its not getting done then its humans not formats that are the issue! That said, I still have a feeling that at any point in the future, a current PT or Logic session will be playable so long as it is readable.

projectMalamute wrote:

D'Piucchstre wrote:
Free software is definately cool, but when was the last time you did a mixdown/edit session with Audacity?

I've never used Audacity for anything.

Exactly. --Editing functions are practically fuckin' useless, and track sync and realtime monitoring of what you're doing simply isn't there.

projectMalamute wrote:When was the last time you actually looked in to what was available outside of corporate controlled software?

I do it all the time, and I use a lot of software that is either GPL'd or free because I'm both a cheap bastard, as well as fairly well versed in computer security issues.