Anthony Flack wrote: Tue Aug 20, 2024 3:12 pm I think digital technology even has the edge when it comes to permanence as well.

I recently dug up some really old masters from my archive. 25 year old cdrs, cheap ones. No problems whatsoever. The only times I've ever had an issue retrieving anything stored digitally was when the disc was visibly fucked in some way, like the coating was cracked or something. I can only think of 2 times that's happened in a quarter century, and both cases were goofy old stuff I didn't really care about so nbd.

I tend to like simple, straightforward tech when I’m riding a creative wave. Sometimes it’s as simple as using whatever mic is plugged in at the moment or maybe it’s just recording to my phone. If my creative process required maintaining a tape machine and bouncing regularly to digital I’d just give up. Maybe that speaks to my attention span, or to the fact that I don’t have a team of engineers at my disposal when I need to get a hot take on the 2008 financial meltdown or whatever.

I just like shit that sounds cool. Sometimes tape sounds cool and sometimes digital sounds cool. I don't believe in magic or the idea of any indigenous purity to any part of a creative work flow. I also agree with FM twelvepoint that the best sounding recording medium is the one that gets in the way of creativity the least.

The entire discussion those nerds are having in the video just stinks of Audiophile mojo vibe good ol' days boomer nonsense. I fucking hate Forrest Gump and don't want to listen to his recordings.

twelvepoint wrote: Wed Aug 21, 2024 11:14 am If my creative process required maintaining a tape machine and bouncing regularly to digital I’d just give up.

Honestly in 2024 it's about as wasteful as including a gas motor under the hood of an EV car just so it makes the "vroom vroom" noise we're accustomed to.

MoreSpaceEcho wrote: Wed Aug 21, 2024 10:01 am

Anthony Flack wrote: Tue Aug 20, 2024 3:12 pm I think digital technology even has the edge when it comes to permanence as well.

I recently dug up some really old masters from my archive. 25 year old cdrs, cheap ones. No problems whatsoever. The only times I've ever had an issue retrieving anything stored digitally was when the disc was visibly fucked in some way, like the coating was cracked or something. I can only think of 2 times that's happened in a quarter century, and both cases were goofy old stuff I didn't really care about so nbd.

I have a lot of old ass CDs going back to the 80s, and have only had one de-laminate. I agree that digital has the edge on permanence.

Digital recording has tended towards better permanence since the OG forum discussion on Radar 24.

But I am still with FM Steve regarding the real-world application of the permanence of analog media over digital. There is a distinction here between putting together demos in GarageBand or Reaper, or mass-produced consumer media like a CD. It's specifically in the context of a final master of a sound recording and the ability to reliably retrieve as much of that information for use as possible in the long-term future.

Albini's argument - that a reel of tape put on a shelf when the session is finished is a safer bet for future retrieval than a digital master - has been borne out in my own experience in the 20+ years I've been on this forum, in his own 40+ years as an engineer, and in countless reissues of material from the 1950s and earlier.

I don't know how anyone could make a claim that "now digital has beat analog in permanence", as the core fact of a reel of tape vs. a digital storage medium hasn't changed.

I presume folks wanting to wade into the argument-pool here are familiar with the discussion around this so I don't expect to tell anyone something they don't know. The evidence in the "analog is a better long-term bet" is very well established.

= Justin

Just a little side story here you may or may not find interesting. Old band made a record circa 2000, the first record I ever mixed in a DAW. I did a lot of things wrong. So many things! I was never happy with how it sounded. Sitting around bored a decade later, I decide to remix it. Dig up all the cdr backups. So many cdrs! Everything transferred fine, no problem there at all. Reopen the session for each song, there they are, just like I left them. Super.

But there was one song that was missing one file, and it was kind of a crucial one, some crazy shit I'd done before that I'd never be able to duplicate. Fuck! What will I do?

Fortunately by then I'd learned what a null test was. I had a backup of the final mix I'd done back in 2000. That mix of course contained the missing crucial track. I dropped the mix into my newly restored multitrack session, which (importantly) I hadn't changed at all, lined it up exactly, flipped phase, hit play and TA DA! As the only difference between the old mix and the current multitrack was the missing track, playing the two simultaneously with the phase flipped revealed the missing track in all its perfect glory. Saved that as a new file, dropped it back into the session, got to work.

I felt like a fucking sorcerer but it's just math.

My own anecdote about analogue storage is that all my film school work was on magnetic tape and 16mm optical film. It was cool. The film was in those big old metal film cans and looked neat. All hand-spliced on a big flatbed editor. Those were fun times. I couldn't play it back at home though, or make a copy. I never actually watched it ever again. Eventually it was destroyed in a fire. So it goes.

Burned CDs might be good for 20 years or longer; I've had some that lasted that long and some that haven't. I think it varies a lot depending on the die quality. I wouldn't trust a burner CD to last much longer. I have a couple of Sega Mega CD games which are suffering from disk rot, thankfully haven't seen that turn up in any of the other old (and in some cases increasingly valuable?) CD games I have. One of the curious things about getting older is watching your possessions age.

That's all transitional technology though. It's like talking about digital cameras from 20 years ago. The difference is that the bandwidth required to store a multitrack recording session today is increasingly trivial. It takes a couple of minutes to copy onto a thumb drive, off that ten-year-old free computer. Soon it will be seconds. Chuck it up on your Google drive space, give a copy to every band member. Touch your phones together, blip.

To be clear, a reel of tape can be a digital storage medium too. My first recording sessions and my first computer programs were both written to cassette tapes. They weren't particularly reliable and you really felt it on the computer programs when they dropped data. Especially the cheap ones. Then I moved onto magnetic floppy disks; they were a bit better. Again, the cheap ones failed all the time. Then magnetic hard drives, they were a bit better again, but magnetic media has always been a little bit sketchy. Whether a deteriorating analogue recording is more use to you than a deteriorating digital one is a separate argument from whether it's best to store things on magnetic tape. Magnetic tape has done us proud for a hundred years but it's still transitional technology, and we can do better.

When I argue that digital technology has proven to retain data more accurately over the long term I'm not talking about magnetic tape vs CDs, I'm talking about things like oral history vs written records. We've had digital revolutions before. The alphabet is a digital technology. DNA is a digital technology.

The ability to be transcribed is what makes something digital. It's also what makes Neil Young say it's "not real", I think?

Something transcribed, as opposed to being transferred by a chain of mechanical impulses. It may prompt somebody to ask "what is information", which leads to Information Theory, which is a fun topic.

My apologies for triple posting, but I can already hear fm steve become infuriated at my hiding behind the phrase "transitional technology", and I don't want to cause the coffee machine at Electrical to start banging.

But it's true. And it's true of magnetic tape as well. Which means I don't think that the experience of the last 50 years is going to be a reliable guide to what happens over the next 50 years. From this point forwards, assuming civilisation holds together, everything happens in the context of ubiquitous, high broadband internet and cheap data storage in the order of terabytes and beyond. Where we're going, we don't need CDs.

We'll see what remains of it all in a thousand years. Or rather, WE won't.

One thing which Mr Albini did bring up in the past which has not borne out in my experience has been incompatibility of data formats. Old data formats hang around forever. TXT and WAV and ASCII are still with us. I still program 80s computer hardware for fun because I am a massive nerd, and one of the perks of the current times is just how easy it is to transfer data to and from these old machines across to new ones, and from there to the giant global info-blob.