I dunno, at some point we gotta let the sea take it all as far a s long term longevity of archival storage of original recording media. The argument that analog tape is better for archiving is starting to subside as working tape machines become fewer and fewer. What's tape look like in another 50 years? By them you can just ask the AI to record you a new version. We can bribe the Master Blaster with a bag of baby teeth to play it during our water rations.

MoreSpaceEcho wrote: Wed Aug 21, 2024 12:51 pm I felt like a fucking sorcerer but it's just math.

One of the founders of Line 6, who retired at the time of the Yamaha acquisition, had a saying. When someone would come up with some crazy idea, code it up, and have it be successful, he would often say something like, "Hey, math works."

Justin Foley wrote: Wed Aug 21, 2024 12:15 pm 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.

Maybe not, but the contextual facts have changed a lot.

20yrs ago we did not have consumer-level things like cloud storage, automatic backups to multiple places, cheap/reliable/affordable NAS setups, remote transfers, etc etc etc. We were all just copying things onto DVD-R and maybe a Porsche Design by LaCie silver spinny drive and putting them in a bankers box.

Conversely, I was at someone's house a while ago who was telling me about having to re-record the bass on some kind of anniversary reissue of some record because no one could find the slave real with the bass track on it. Warehouses burn down.

Sometimes a memo goes out from the studio to bin the extra 70mm copies of "Days of Thunder" and someone accidentally trashes ever known 70mm print of "Days of Heaven" instead.

I had a smart professor in university who pointed out that if you want to compare two things you can't in good faith compare the worst possible version of one thing to the best possible version of another.

mdc wrote: Thu Aug 22, 2024 9:19 am 20yrs ago we did not have consumer-level things like cloud storage, automatic backups to multiple places, cheap/reliable/affordable NAS setups, remote transfers, etc etc etc.

The problem with this stuff is not what's technically possible, but ownership. We don't really know what will happen to server farm data down the line, who will own them and what they will deem 'important'. (see recent news stories about major TV networks erasing decades worth of archived episodes)

I always find notions about musicians maintaining digital backups and transfers of their multitrack masters, testing and swapping out drives every few years, and doing this indefinitely kind of funny. Most musicians can barely find their car keys. A tape just sits in a closet. All mine are (and sure, have some digital backups of those, redundancy is good practice). In fact with an ongoing archival project of mine, there's one release where I've been having trouble locating the 24 bit master file, and will likely have to take the 1/2" reel in for a transfer. And this is for an 18 year old recording: not long at all in archival terms.

mdc wrote: Thu Aug 22, 2024 9:19 am Conversely, I was at someone's house a while ago who was telling me about having to re-record the bass on some kind of anniversary reissue of some record because no one could find the slave real with the bass track on it. Warehouses burn down.

Sometimes a memo goes out from the studio to bin the extra 70mm copies of "Days of Thunder" and someone accidentally trashes ever known 70mm print of "Days of Heaven" instead.

...

mdc wrote: Thu Aug 22, 2024 9:19 am I had a smart professor in university who pointed out that if you want to compare two things you can't in good faith compare the worst possible version of one thing to the best possible version of another.

I don't know what worst case scenario you're referring to. A band records a record onto a multitrack tape. This is mixed down onto a master two-track. There are two physical masters. These objects - about the size of a nice sized pair of coffee-table books - are then usually put somewhere. With a little bit of foresight between the guitarist and the drummer, they are stored in separate places. Maybe no one ever needs them again, maybe Numero Group 25 years later wants to reissue the record and needs the two-track, maybe a decade later someone wants to grab just a stem of the guitar track from the tracking master to loop it on a toothpaste commercial. If history is any guide, there's an excellent chance the information will be there for retrieval. The guitarist has been keeping the two-track with his vinyl collection despite having moved across the country twice, and the drummer's son (the drummer died in a Space X accident, tragic) has been keeping the tape reels in a bin called "Dad's old stuff". Find someone with a tape machine (less-common than in the past, but still very easy) and string up the tape.

Pennington's point is a real-world one. Sure, digital transferability and storage continue to get easier. That ubiquity does not translate to information permanence. The two-track is an easier problem to consider, of course. A 24-bit .wav file has remained pretty constant over recent history. Assuming the actual digital information does not encounter any trouble (remember that an error in a digital file is usually fatal for retrieving any information), someone does need to actually keep track of where the archival version of the file remains. If it's in something that requires an account, the account must be maintained. If it's on a physical unit, the physical unit must remain compatible (and not be damaged) with whatever method of retrieval exists in the future.

The likelihood of error in this case is not an edge case. I am reasonably vigilant about digital storage (certainly more than anyone in my friend/family circle) and I still find that there are photos, documents, audio that just end up being gone. Five, ten years later, the bridge between that digital file and my ability to access it has failed. This is a very, very common experience for people. One can take steps to lessen the likelihood of it, but it is still far from unusual to find that the file is gone or doesn't work.

If we move over to the digital multitrack, the problem is compounded (and I want to say exponentially, but that would just be vaguely descriptive) by the reliance that the session data still makes sense to the DAW. Presuming that it doesn't - a very fair presumption - one could still rebuild the multitrack file from the individual audio files if they are still accessible. God help the engineer in that, but it is technically possible. Still, we are most likely in fuckskivile as far as grabbing that guitar track.

Compare these two scenarios. You're making a bet on what's likely to work in the future like it works today. It doesn't make sense to claim that they're equivalent. Analog clearly wins.

I belabor this point because in this community of music-makers, someone may read this long post and think: "shit, I guess it's not a bad idea to get a 7.5 ips 1/4" 2-track copy of that last record we just spent 3 years working on." Yes, you should.

= Justin

The biggest change that I've seen to attitudes in Rock and Roll is how much amp simulators has been accepted. I'm only a hobbyist who refuses to evolve, so I haven't kept up, but I've heard big claims. I imagine this must also rankle the tone-lawyers who have invested heavily in distressed mojo. At the same time I recently heard that Roger McGuinn's Bryds 12-string sound was always totally DI with heavy compression from the desk. And shit, that's like one of the most famous and recognizable guitar tones maybe ever.

I believe Steve made mention that his preference for tape, other than the archiving thing (which I agree has seen a paradigm shift and is mostly irrelevant), was down to the workflow. And here I agree in all facets. There aren't "creative" solutions anymore. The cure to everything is to just download another plug-in, and results show it. A creative endeavor needs a foil.

zorg wrote: The cure to everything is to just download another plug-in, and results show it. A creative endeavor needs a foil.

It is refreshing (said by someone who came up in the digital era and was always technically "going backwards" to this stuff) that the sound is already built in to a good analog path. Even mid-tier analog gear can still sound really cool and fitting. My last thing was a live to 2 track recording: John Hardy preamp > reverb plate > 1/2" 15ips tape and quality-wise I couldn't ask for anything better.

It's telling that there's an active 7+ page thread about emulators, plugins, saturation tools, etc. It's cool that the stuff has gotten pretty good and is accessible, but it gets to be a drag trying out 5 different "channel strips" on every track just to inject some fucking life into the thing. Then you spend weeks mixing and remixing on your laptop for results that are.. maybe a little better than the last? Maybe not. All to try and conjure up something on par with what musicians used to just knock out in a couple days in good rooms.

penningtron wrote: Thu Aug 22, 2024 11:22 am It's telling that there's an active 7+ page thread about emulators, plugins, saturation tools, etc. It's cool that the stuff has gotten pretty good and is accessible, but it gets to be a drag trying out 5 different "channel strips" on every track just to inject some fucking life into the thing. Then you spend weeks mixing and remixing on your laptop for results that are.. maybe a little better than the last? Maybe not. All to try and conjure up something on par with what musicians used to just knock out in a couple days in good rooms.

As a provocateur of that thread, I couldn't agree with you more in regards to using tools that work for you. It really doesn't matter if it's digital or analog anymore. Despite the platform, I think we all can relate to buying and selling and trading up in pursuit of finding that sound we're looking for. With plugins, at least there is trial versions and cheap price tags. It's a daunting amount of options, so bringing to the surface some that stand out seems rather productive in a tech forum.

Musicians used to just go to a studio, which had limited equipment with an engineer that knew how to use it, and could get what they needed from it immediately. I think the lesson there is that for the digital world, find the plugins that work for you and learn to use them.

benadrian wrote: Wed Aug 21, 2024 10:26 pm

MoreSpaceEcho wrote: Wed Aug 21, 2024 12:51 pm I felt like a fucking sorcerer but it's just math.

One of the founders of Line 6, who retired at the time of the Yamaha acquisition, had a saying. When someone would come up with some crazy idea, code it up, and have it be successful, he would often say something like, "Hey, math works."

haha I like those kind of sayings that stick around a company.

Bob Taylor would say, "If it was easy, the chicken guys would do it". Because there used to be a chicken slaughterhouse on the same street.

My uncle (in-law?) was an old IBM guy, and the engineers had two major sayings, one being "In God we trust, all others must bring data."

and the other:

"Never have so few, done so much, for so little." <-- I use that one all the time


A guy I worked with: "well, you know what they would say about it in Chicago?"

"What?"

"Eat shit!"

zorg wrote: Thu Aug 22, 2024 10:59 am The biggest change that I've seen to attitudes in Rock and Roll is how much amp simulators has been accepted. I'm only a hobbyist who refuses to evolve, so I haven't kept up, but I've heard big claims.

It's passed a threshold, but I felt like this same discussion happened when the Pod came out. I can't help to think that 10 years from now half the stuff is electronic waste and an old tube amp still kicks ass. If you're on a stage you're still getting mic'ed, going through likely a digital board into whatever else.. so really, what's "the sound" ?
I think the difference is for a larger majority of people this time, it's good enough and it really is.