bishopdante wrote:steve wrote:Nobody in a band is going to do any of the redundant file maintenance described. They barely change their strings.Agreed, but this is why professional technicians and service providers exist.This is missing the entire point.

bishopdante wrote:steve wrote:Nobody in a band is going to do any of the redundant file maintenance described. They barely change their strings.Agreed, but this is why professional technicians and service providers exist.I see no reason why a recording studio (or band) shouldn't be using a cloud server for archive, and paying a small monthly bill for high reliability.As an example Amazon S3 costs per month:Volatile: $0.023 / GB Infrequent access: $0.0125 / GBCold Storage: $0.004 / GBArchival of analog and digital materials using contemporary data center methods (and conversion to open/accessible formats) isn't happening enough, and it's something that should be happening more. Cold-storage archive, or original "hard copy" in a secure/fireproof facility is good, but making stuff globally accessible as full-backup digital archive and indexed like a library open to the world without requiring legions of staff and museum-sized spaces is a good thing, but isn't happening enough. Instead of serving as a grand library built to last, Internet technology is currently largely used as a commercial circus of the most temporary and ephemeral nature. That's not the only option, and large-scale nonprofit archival for artists is something that storage and bandwidth are now sufficiently available and affordable to be on the table.This is worth looking at: https://www.archiveteam.org/Not enough, studios and bands should use Git and their own cloud-hosted repository (NOT github) to fully document and store the entire recording, mixing and mastering process:

I'm going to change my strings...

I really have no horse in this race, but it seems that all the back and forth technical mumbo jumbo is only reinforcing Steve's point. On the one hand: blah blah blah, on the other hand: a reel of tape. Digital totally has it's place in the world, but in the interest of simplicity, preservation and reliability, tape clearly seems to be the winner. Still.

Riff Magnum wrote:I really have no horse in this race, but it seems that all the back and forth technical mumbo jumbo is only reinforcing Steve's point. On the one hand: "blah blah blah," on the other hand: a reel of tape. Digital totally has it's place in the world, but in the interest of simplicity, preservation and reliability, tape clearly seems to be the winner. Still.I like the argument n.c. made about any of the tape machines appreciating in value is a small facet of the argument but I hadn't thought of it that way.I moved a box of outdated digital stuff I can neither use nor sell,

MRoyce wrote:bishopdante wrote:steve wrote:Nobody in a band is going to do any of the redundant file maintenance described. They barely change their strings.Agreed, but this is why professional technicians and service providers exist.I see no reason why a recording studio (or band) shouldn't be using a cloud server for archive, and paying a small monthly bill for high reliability.As an example Amazon S3 costs per month:Volatile: $0.023 / GB Infrequent access: $0.0125 / GBCold Storage: $0.004 / GBArchival of analog and digital materials using contemporary data center methods (and conversion to open/accessible formats) isn't happening enough, and it's something that should be happening more. Cold-storage archive, or original "hard copy" in a secure/fireproof facility is good, but making stuff globally accessible as full-backup digital archive and indexed like a library open to the world without requiring legions of staff and museum-sized spaces is a good thing, but isn't happening enough. Instead of serving as a grand library built to last, Internet technology is currently largely used as a commercial circus of the most temporary and ephemeral nature. That's not the only option, and large-scale nonprofit archival for artists is something that storage and bandwidth are now sufficiently available and affordable to be on the table.This is worth looking at: https://www.archiveteam.org/Not enough, studios and bands should use Git and their own cloud-hosted repository (NOT github) to fully document and store the entire recording, mixing and mastering process:More industries outside software development need to get on Git/Mercurial/whatever for revision control. I don't know if it's practical for recording, they weren't developed for large file management and lose their effectiveness. you will start annihilating storage space the further along you go maintaining a full history tree... although with Reaper, this might work out just fine especially if you're just working locally and pushing changes.You'll end up creating a repository for every project, which may not be a bad thing.I tried to do this for mechanical/control engineering projects and with Solidworks files alone I ran into a lot of problemsoh, this thread probably covers it well https://www.reddit.com/r/git/comments/3 ... \_projects/

steve wrote:Live at Leeds is a good example. The reissue has about an album's worth of extra material that wasn't deemed worthy during the initial release, all of which is stunning.I have never known you to like The Who. When did this 'appen?

It's becoming more and more well known that you are fool if you don't have two separate backups of your computer. One in the cloud, and one physical backup you keep separate from your computer. I worked as a Mac repair technician for 4 years and cloud storage syncing backups have become more and more common. That said plenty of people came in with failed HDDs who lost everything. I agree many folks aren't responsible with their data, but I think the notion that a physical copy of a tape is more permanent than digital copies that often live on multiple device in each band members' house, fairly silly. These processes are getting more and more automated and more and more commonplace. I've never run a studio but I imagine digital studios have some sort of shelf life for their digital files after which they delete them? Living in CA, it's much more likely that my house will burn down than my cloud service will fail.

At the risk of stirring up the pot, I m curious rhetorically:Justin Foley wrote:1 - Tape formulation turns out to be lousy after 20 years or something. Solution: record the multitrack and the stereo master to different formulations.How is this different from backing up a set of digital files to multiple devices; that is, why is making copies of an analog master acceptable whereas digital backup is seen as a nuisance or a drawback?2 - My house burns down. Solution: store the multitrack in a different physical location than the stereo master. In this case, the bassist's house.What happens when his house burns down?3 - There are no readily available working tape machines in 100 years. Solution: ugh. Keep a few tape machines in good shape, buy stuff from those still supporting the technology and try to let others see the value.# 3 is the one I don't like. OTOH, I know there will be no readily available working computers that will run ProTools 10 but that's kind of cold comfort.Why is it assumed that building an analog machine from scratch 100 years from now will be substantially less difficult than writing software that can play back a .wav file?

Sorry, misread points 1 and 2. Mea culpa. Re: point 3, equating a DAW session to tape reels is (in my opinion, at least) a false equivalence. The DAW session is your audio format, mixing console, and racks of outboard. Just as you could take your reels to any studio with a suitable machine and play them back, so can you drop a set of WAV files into a DAW and do the same. Most any DAW will bounce your audio chunks to unique tracks with a common starting point with little more effort than a couple mouse clicks or a keyboard shortcut.It just seems to me that many staunch anti-digital arguments are framed in a way that is best case for analog and worst case for digital. I think that while they each may present unique challenges, there are plenty of parallels that can be drawn.Me personally? For the purpose of recording that I do and the infrequency that I do it, digital is perfectly fine. Actually, most recently I used a hybrid setup, tracking to a 24-channel PT7 rig through a console and outboard, and then taking the audio files home and mixing them in Logic. I sold my analog machine because the time and money required to keep it working wasn t worth it to me for my intended use. But if I was in a band that was recording for commercial release, I would love to at least mix to analog if not track, budget permitting.I m not trying to tell anybody that they re right or wrong...just read some of your points and asked a question.