The only issue I have with hard drives, be it USB or whatever, is the fact that you can erase it with the click of a button, or screw it up unitentionally. You can't erase a DVD.

Before I started using DVDs, I had a hard drive go bad when I was saving another project, and I lost all of the other projects that were on the drive. It happened much too easily. At least with a DVD, you have to try much harder to damage it, and it will sit in its case most of the time after its burnt. It won't be used for any other purpose other than reloading the audio files.

Slightly off-topic, but NARAS actually has an official, 37 page document entitled "Pro Tools Session Guidelines For Music Production" (current version 2.2b1).

http://www.grammy.com/pdfs/recording_academy/producers_and_engineers/ptguidelines.pdf

The opening paragraph is pretty funny, especially considering how digital adherents often cite their medium as "faster" than analog:

A few years ago an engineer could open a reel of tape they’d never seen before, glance at the track sheet and begin working almost immediately, but more recently, with Pro Tools and other DAW's [sic] replacing tape machines on many recording projects, the amount of time between opening a session from another engineer and going to work has definitely increased. In some cases, mixing engineers hire separate operators and add a half-day to the mix just to make sense out of the session.

Fuck me, it's bad enough we have to worry about technology changes potentially obsoleting our recordings...apparently we also need to worry about documentation standards, session layout minutiae, and the possibility that the future engineer might not be able to make any sense of the session, even if the computer can.

Anyway, there are actually some good suggestions in this document, but adherence to them seems to be the exception rather than the norm. (Are any studios requiring their staff to follow such guidelines? Doubt it). Consolidating audio files in a manner like cjc166 describes (and which Steve contends no one does) is mandated as proper practice according to this paper.

You have to be very organized and methodical FROM THE START, otherwise you'll waste hours doing clean-up at the end of the session (or, more likely, not do it at all).

Think I'll go open me some old SDII Pro Tools sessions and export to .wav. Good times, good times.

ebeam wrote:However, I just can't imagine a situation where I'd want to go back and remix some old project in 20 years or really care if I couldn't.

Reissues often include additional material that wasn't included in the original release, cf the Who "Live at Leeds."

Also, occasions for reissuing material in new formats, for film soundtracks and other commercial uses are pretty common and have nothing to do with the original released versions.

Master tapes get used for a lot of things. They are also part of history and ought to survive.

smazur wrote:Consolidating audio files in a manner like cjc166 describes (and which Steve contends no one does) is mandated as proper practice according to this paper.

Never even heard of the document, never talked to anybody about it, and came up with that same system myself just by thinking. That's the thing that needs to happen, is people need to think about what sort of things they might expect to happen in the future, and how to accomodate those possibilities.

smazur wrote:You have to be very organized and methodical FROM THE START, otherwise you'll waste hours doing clean-up at the end of the session (or, more likely, not do it at all).

Yep. Organization is key with all things digital. Something I've been doing for a few/several years now is to always start filenames with a 6-digit number in the format YYMMDD, so today would be 080626. That way, your recording session called "080626_PicturesOfYerMom" already tells you exactly what day it was recorded just by you looking at the name. Works great for mixes, too. With the Chrome Robes stuff we're doing right now, we've messed around with adding a suffix after the filename if there are multiple mixes generated in a day that we'd like to compare against each other on outside systems. So 080626_ChickenButt_S and 080626_ChickenButt_B would indicate whether it was my mix or Ben's mix of the song Chicken Butt (which will totally be on our forthcoming album).

Something else I'd recommend in the digital domain, even though it's not required by modern systems, is to NEVER EVER use a blank space in a folder name or a filename. Always use the underscore. Same goes for web addresses, basically anything. Both Windows and Mac accomodate the space character. Watch what it does when you upload it to your website. Fucking %20 or whatever it is that it adds in there. Just don't do it.

Good habits are really easy to form and maintain. Takes almost no effort. Resisting doing it is a really stupid waste of time that increases the chances of problems down the road. But most people don't seem to think much about problems down the road, or how to take actions now that can easily eliminate the possibility of them happening.

With digital, it's pretty simple. Always keep at least two copies of anything important, and keep them on different media. One on DVD, one on hard disk. One on hard disk, one on flash disk. Whatever it is.

An idea ebeam and I were shooting the shit about one day was to take a slab of metal and etch the stream of 0's and 1's into it. If it's a non-corrosive metal that has a pretty stable structure and all that, it seems like a great way to preserve a song for the longest time possible, certainly longer than any disc or tape format. Might even survive fires, if they weren't hot enough to liquefy the metal. And it should be a piece of cake at any point in the future to read that information in optically with some sort of computer scanning type thingy. As long as humans stay at a point where we're not living in some kinda post-apocalyptic Max Max world, that seems like pretty much the most durable audio storage format I can think of.

ebeam works in nanotech, too, so the piece of metal could be really fucking small. I don't know the exact dimensions or nothing, but maybe you could burn a song into a piece of metal the size of a guitar pick or something. I forget what he said in that regard. But you could probably fit an entire album's worth of multitrack wav data onto a piece of metal smaller than a 12" record. That could be pretty cool.

burning 1s and 0s into a small layer of metal? that's just crazy enough to work! if only the inventors of CDs/DVDs had thought of that!





edit: your system of backing up digital data is pretty good, though. i've actually started doing the same thing now that i record bands that aren't my own. i'm pretty* small fry, though.



* make that extremely small fry.

MrWarandieBoy wrote:burning 1s and 0s into a small layer of metal? that's just crazy enough to work! if only the inventors of CDs/DVDs had thought of that!

You know that's not what you're doing when you record on a CDR, right? You're just changing the color of an unstable organic dye. You know that right? You're just using "burn" in the vernacular, right?

I hope you know that anyway.

steve wrote:

MrWarandieBoy wrote:burning 1s and 0s into a small layer of metal? that's just crazy enough to work! if only the inventors of CDs/DVDs had thought of that!

You know that's not what you're doing when you record on a CDR, right? You're just changing the color of an unstable organic dye. You know that right? You're just using "burn" in the vernacular, right?

I hope you know that anyway.

yes steve, i know. i just thought that the suggestion was similar enough to reality to be slightly humorous.


very slightly, as it turns out.

Yeah, I was more on top of my language when I said "etch" the first time than when I said "burn" the second. Honestly, I'm not clear on how the nano thing works, I think it might technically be "etching" as well. Which would be dope, right, to be able to bring a lady home and ask "would you like to listen to my etchings?"

The point is, not CD or DVD-like, this would be actually taking a slab/billet/whatever of metal, and physically machining it so there are streams of pits or non-pits that represent the 0's and 1's you'd find in a digital representation of an audio signal.

Personally, in a case like this, I wouldn't mind getting all "look at me, I'm an artist" about it and using a series of sheets of metal that would be welded together one next to the other into a continuous wall, with each "pit" or "non-pit" being an inch square, and representing one of our songs like that.

You could do a stereo 6 minute song at 44100/24-bit using less than a billion pits/non-pits. You don't even need a billion of them!

If each pit was 1" x 1", and the metal wall was 20' tall, then you'd only need it to be like 50 miles long to fit one song on there.

WTF?!?! I'm so gonna do this as soon as I win the lottery and buy a couple cities downstate. Giant metal wall with a song carved into it.

Yeah, either that or smaller pits. I suppose in my fantasy, the stereo master of the song is etched into a piece of metal about the size of a gold bar. So probably it'd have to go the nano route. But on the upside, I think that if we use the right metal, it'll last for hundreds or even thousands of years. Until somebody melts it for scrap.

yeah, i took your original 'burn' comment in the light you meant it (and made my subsequent comment in the same light).

BURN!!!!