I was thinking about what it would be like to store all our work on 2" tape in the closet and just for fun (?) I thought I'd have a go at guesstimating the information content of a reel of tape, and to make it even more fun we'll use wacky American units.

So, back in the 80s when I used to write data onto cassette tapes, I reckon you could do about 8kb of data per minute. Any faster than that and you'd start getting serious reliability issues. So that's 480kb of data on a 60 minute tape, which is 1/8th of an inch wide and about 300 ft long. Or 1/16th of an inch wide and 600 ft long since it runs both ways, but it amounts to the same thing.

I'm going make a wild assumption and say that well-maintained, professional studio equipment is 100% less noisy than consumer-grade equipment by surface area. So let's round that up to 500kb of data on a 60 minute audio cassette, and assume a professional deck can push that up to 1Mb.

Now compare that to a 2" reel of studio tape at 5000 ft. It's 16 times wider, so the same length of 2" tape should hold 16Mb compared to 1Mb at 1/8 inch. And it's 5000/300 times longer, so that comes out as... 267Mb? Or to put it another way, there's about 267x as much surface area on a 2" reel than a 60 minute audio cassette.

Hmm, does that sound right? I was expecting more. Of course for analogue audio you're running at a much higher acceptable error rate, but still.

What about the other way? Ok, I've never used a 2" tape but 16 tracks at 30 IPS for 15 minutes-ish...? For digital audio equivalent, 15 minutes x 16 tracks of 48k/24 bit is, er, about 1 gigabyte I think?

Either way, unless I've goofed it seems like a reel of 2" tape is somewhere in the ballpark of a compact disc in terms of storage capacity. Feel free to correct me.

Imagine using one of the big tape machines at Electrical as your computer's hard drive. But that is more or less what 1960s computers were doing. It's proven technology!

benadrian wrote: Thu Aug 22, 2024 7:43 pm

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.

This is a great perspective - I'm glad to hear that latter part is something that's considered.. I've generally tried to be that way, knowing I've also contributed to some amount of wastage. It keeps me up at night sometimes

Those numbers I posted above are bugging me, because I know you could get more than 1 GB on a DAT tape. And modern tape storage is better still. But if we are talking about 1960s tech I guess it tracks? No pun intended.

Yeah, this is just silly nowadays. If you have a digital workflow and think that transfering to tape for archiving is worthwhile, that is madness. As Anthony says there are exactly zero industries that would do that, and ample digital storage is readily available as both cloud and physical drives.

Anthony Flack wrote: Fri Aug 23, 2024 6:30 pm 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.

Analog or digital this just seems backwards. Things that we hold onto and take care of have more of a chance of surviving into the future than stuff 'held' by 3rd party cloud providers. The bank account metaphor doesn't make sense because those are FDIC (don't know the equivalents in other countries) backed and regulated. I'm not about to read iCloud's SLA on a Saturday morning but I doubt there's anything in there about guaranteed longevity. The cloud is fine for backing up your laptop at night, or during the duration of working on something and passing references and revisions back and forth, but it's not an archive in a true sense.

I'm not really sure what the relevance of analog tape as a storage for terabytes of corporate or government data or whatever is. Storing (or y'know, just mixing to) 15-30-60 minute albums on reels is perfectly reasonable and proven method, even with albums made with hybrid methods.

(and by 'mixing to analog' I also mean simultaneously or shortly after making digital safety copies too. I've never needed those safety copies but it's good practice. Virtually no one is doing the other way around.)

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. 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.

Well...

With amp simulators?

There is more to it than just whatever these two are on about in the initial post.

Oh man, the interviewer is Zane Lowe? That sycophant makes this even funnier.

zorg wrote: Yeah, this is just silly nowadays. If you have a digital workflow and think that transfering to tape for archiving is worthwhile, that is madness. As Anthony says there are exactly zero industries that would do that, and ample digital storage is readily available as both cloud and physical drives.

This sentiment keeps getting brought up, but FMs greg and eephus were talking about doing exactly this on some kind of youtube livestream a while back, and I remember them bringing up the slight sound benefits, too.
Not to equate that to whatever Neil Young said (he’s still the best), since the context isn’t the same, but I’ve paid good money to own a lot of records any one of them were involved with over the past 20 years.

It's not particularly related to the topic at hand (whatever that actually is??) but there are a few deep dive articles floating around about NY's studio setup, they're fully worth a read:

https://www.audiotechnology.com/PDF/FEA ... _Ranch.pdf