TylerDeadPine wrote: Thu Aug 22, 2024 7:07 pm

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.

Sure, I'll make this about me!

Working for "big modeler" has been both an amazing aspect to my life, and an amazing contradiction as well. Amp modeling is fun. I've used modeling for demos, home recording, and even some "serious" recordings since the 90s. I was a customer before I was an employee. I know how good it can be nowadays and how indistinguishable it is on recordings.

There's a big side that bums me out. I know that the products that I'm helping to develop will last 5-10 years for most people, before they buy the next big thing to replace it. I know that most likely all the gear made will be broken beyond repair in perhaps 30 years. I'm making a lot of waste, or at least quicker waste than tube amps and boss pedals. I've personally stopped buying as much new gear as I can, both in the guitar world, but also in the bike world. So much stuff already exists. And I still play my big, old tube amp for my noisy rock band.

Oh, and I've not watched that NY/RR video as I'm sure it's insufferable.

Tape is undoubtedly the cooler medium and I think the fact alone that some of these machines have been running for half a century and remain maintainable and require owners to invest in highly specialized caretaking is reason enough to opt for analog. If I were Neil Young or Metallica or secretly had generational wealth I’d sure as shit get a 2” machine and dote on it. But my reality is I get to make music on evenings and whatever time I can carve out of lunch hour on my WFH days so 90% of my tracking is the same Audio Technica mic into some miserable Focusrite box into Reaper like the rest of you.

Having recorded in nice studios and briefly co-owning a 2” multitrack myself, I can say there is nothing enjoyable about going digital other than the fact I can make music significantly faster.

I love Neil Young and respect Rick Rubin but these guys have existed up their rarefied asses so long they have some weird options on shit that is completely unrelatable for 99% of musicians and the psychoacoustic babble and convoluted workflow techniques aren’t inspiring to boots on the ground songwriters.

Justin Foley wrote: Thu Aug 22, 2024 10:35 am I don't know what worst case scenario you're referring to.

I mean, there's lots but here's one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Univ ... udios_fire

I would imagine that a server farm burning to the ground would have less impact on the stuff that is nominally being kept therein. And yes, of course, dropbox or google or apple or whomever could go into liquidation tomorrow and just pull the plug on everything and poof.

But tapes get lost, labels go under, people die and the executors of their estates don't know that this shoebox full of cassette tapes in moms basement are actually the 4tk masters of the demos for whatever seminal record people care about.

I'm not arguing that one thing is better than the other, just that things have changed in the last 20yrs and that having safe/long term/reliable/instant/decentralized digital storage is cheap and easy in a way it wasn't when I was 25.

mdc wrote: Fri Aug 23, 2024 10:07 am

Justin Foley wrote: Thu Aug 22, 2024 10:35 am I don't know what worst case scenario you're referring to.

I mean, there's lots but here's one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria

fyp

Is the Library of Alexandrea a worst case scenario for analogue or digital? That seems like the equivalent of a server farm burning down. Nobody seems to know how much data was lost. It's fortunate some of the data was backed up elsewhere. We've still got Homer's Iliad and Plato's Republic and Euclid's Elements, after all. You can buy these books today.

A quick google gave me an estimate of 700,000 scrolls in the library. A typical scroll was around 1200 lines or 10k words, also according to google. How many letters in the Greek alphabet? I'm going to be generous and give them a whole byte per letter and if an average word is maybe five letters long, that's about 50k bytes per scroll, so uh, on the back of a napkin in my head... roughly equivalent to an old 40Mb hard drive worth of data?

Digital was held back for a long time while our best duplication technology was a monastery. Cost of duplication is a factor. Still, its track record is pretty good. I'm contemplating this after reading Justin's words and looking at my analogue vinyl copy of his album about stories from the Old Testament.

Alongside my amusement/exasperation with audio engineers who presume to know more about information theory than people like telecommunications engineers, mathematicians and astrophysicists, is the notion that recording sessions are the last word on data storage. That guy with a closet full of hard drives is Trent Reznor in the 1990s.

I'm a game developer. We have millions of dollars invested in our data. It's not backed up on magnetic tape. It's on google drive and Github. In the future (that is to say, now), having cloud storage is a basic utility, like having a bank account.

So, corporate data more or less? I'm very familiar with the 3-2-1 backup plans organizations put in place. But all those scenarios are mostly thinking 1-5 years out, not about transferring Grandpa's old punk reel for a small pressing. For every story of a warehouse fire, there are dozens if not more of those reissue scenarios happening all the damn time.

But if you want to put all your work on Google cloud thinking it'll be there in 50 years, have fun. It's not like all the major cloud providers aren't owned by creepy ghouls who won't jack their prices or 'lose' your data when they need the space for their latest AI toy.

Anthony Flack wrote: Fri Aug 23, 2024 5:10 pm Is the Library of Alexandrea a worst case scenario for analogue or digital? That seems like the equivalent of a server farm burning down

I'm not sure there is any server farm that is the sole location of data of any kind. probably exists but most servers farms are supporting cloud or ate least parody solutions. We recently purchased cloud backup solution for our petabytes (tape drives baby!!!) of video files and its dispersed everywhere, even if the app/company we use to host our uploading solution goes under, all our data is accessible via out direct server links. I am unsure how it works, but it would take the internet getting zeroed and every server farm involved to burn to the ground for it to permanently go away, but not everyone has the resources of a Fortune 100 mega corp. Even then, the absurd back stock of Digital Tape Backup still exists, So our warehouse would have to go in the attack as well. Could happen but if something like that happened I doubt anyone would care about the video of a 2014 Sales meeting or the Master Tapes of Neil Young's horrible squelching voice. We would be running Baby Teeth farms for the new economy.

penningtron wrote: Fri Aug 23, 2024 5:46 pm But if you want to put all your work on Google cloud thinking it'll be there in 50 years, have fun.

I bet it will stand a better chance than a reel of tape in a closet.

I think it will still be there in the corporate ghoul data system in 50 years, just like my money will still be there in the corporate ghoul data system and I'm confident enough in the continued existence of the banks to not keep it all as cash under my mattress. Although that analogy doesn't fully hold up because of course we do have local copies of everything as well, but I wouldn't trust a local copy. But we are at the stage where having a few GB of cloud storage is a normal basic thing like having a bank account.

We're just remaking an old game of mine from 23 years ago. We still have the old source code. I don't expect the work we do today to be of no value in another 23 years, so I think we are seeing the end of the days when people would just chuck away potentially valuable material that could directly impact the asset value of your business.

One of the big factors here is the speed, bandwidth, storage capacity etc. keep increasing by orders of magnitude, while the amount of data needed for a multitrack recording session remains fairly consistent. It used to be an awkwardly large amount of data, Trent Reznor with a closet full of hard drives. Now it's less of a big deal. Soon enough, it will be an inconsequentially small amount of data, and trivial to keep multiple copies. Even more trivial I mean.

Well I'm convinced of one thing and that is both of these guys wear flip flops on planes.