steve wrote:

scott wrote:B) to have every virtual track exported as a single wav, comprised of all the edits/crossfades that may have been enacted on all the punched sections, etc., with leading silence so they all start at the zero mark

Yeah, nobody does this. It would be better, of course, but nobody does it.

The only time (so far) that I've recorded a band and they wanted to have somebody else to the mix, this is what they asked for and what we delivered. I didn't know that it's actually super easy to do in Samplitude, and as such I spent maybe 3 hours worth of adding silence, dragging tracks, and exporting. If I knew how to do it, it would've only taken me probably 5 or 10 minutes. Now that I know, I know. Fucking Samplitude, written by robot-minded, utterly non-user-friendly Germans!

If the day came that it looked like the PC/Windows format was ending, or the existence of the Samplitude program was about to be negated, I'm sure we'd do the same with all the sessions we have right now. Unless there was a nuclear explosion/EMP whatnot, the computers we have on hand would serve the task, as would the copy of Samplitude that's installed right now and could be installed in the future. Until that day comes, we don't really *need* to do it. Just archiving the sessions and wav data is enough.

scott wrote:

steve wrote:

scott wrote:B) to have every virtual track exported as a single wav, comprised of all the edits/crossfades that may have been enacted on all the punched sections, etc., with leading silence so they all start at the zero mark

Yeah, nobody does this. It would be better, of course, but nobody does it.

The only time (so far) that I've recorded a band and they wanted to have somebody else to the mix, this is what they asked for and what we delivered.

So you did it once.
You realize every one of the couple thousand sessions I have conducted is more durable than that, right? And I didn't have to do anything to make that happen, right? And that you haven't done it for all the other stuff you have recorded and are recording, and yet you expect that someday you'll just spend a couple of months doing it all at once without getting paid to do it because it's become some kind of emergency and oh fuck it who cares about that shit anyway...

Nobody does it as a regular regimen, and nobody will pay to have it done for everything being recorded continuously as we speak.

Discussion beaten to death many times here.

Steve is right.

Anyone who disagrees is wrong.

I'm not being sarcastic. I'm serious.

D'Piucchstre wrote:

projectMalamute wrote:

D'Piucchstre wrote:
Free software is definately cool, but when was the last time you did a mixdown/edit session with Audacity?

I've never used Audacity for anything.

Exactly. --Editing functions are practically fuckin' useless, and track sync and realtime monitoring of what you're doing simply isn't there.

This is a straw man argument. It's like writing off Windows as a viable option because the equalizer in Media Player is not suitable for doing mastering work.

For multitrack recording I use Ardour, same as these guys here.

I think that a lot of the impermanence issues with digital file archiving are going to be addressed when solid state drives become more of the standard.

You can get a 16gb usb flash drive for like $100 these days. Much more rugged than CD/DVD/regular spindle hard drives. I've seen someone accidentally run over a usb memory stick so that the plastic housing was obliterated and all they had was the actual memory chip connected to a usb connector, and it plugged in and read just fine.

There's still the issue of exporting seperate wav files and then having to sync them up in whatever software you use, but that's another debate.

projectMalamute wrote:For multitrack recording I use Ardour, same as these guys here.

Wicked Pissa, thanks buddy!

Tim, I'm not disagreeing with your agreement with Steve. Steve is dropping straight truth here. My only point is that it's not impossible, at all, as the thread title invokes. Nor is it prohibitively difficult to export sessions in a highly-usefully-archivable fashion, a way that should stand the test of time for at least decades and probably longer. I wholly agree with Steve's point that folks *probably* aren't doing it, and that tape by its nature has longevity built into it. This remains the strongest argument in favor of tape over digital, with the progress of 24-bit audio and associated devices.

It is a goal of mine to record in a proper studio, like Electrical, with a supremely-competent engineer, like Steve, as frequently as the situation allows. I'm not some die-hard "digital rules!" guy by any means. I'm fine with both. And I just don't feel inclined to sit quietly while people say stuff about either format that just isn't reasonable, which is what was happening here with insinuations that there's *any* floppy disk archives of C64 multitrack sessions out there that folks just can't do anything with. Proprietary format digital shit from the early days of standalone systems and whatnot, sure. But wav is a perfectly valid long-term storage format, especially in style "B" that I described above, which Steve agreed to because he's a sensible person.

Some entrepreneurial motherfucker out there oughta get into the "pay by the year" data maintenance system. A RAID array and a doude to copy files around every year or ten as necessary, and this whole scenario is a little different. GOOD audio archivists have to exist, right? Isn't that what MTAR does, aside from being an engineer?

I think that any band/artist who think someone will want to revise their work in 50 years is pretentious and thinking way highly of themselves.

The fact that tape machines survived since the 30's(?) till now doesn't necessarily mean that they will survive until 2100.

Also, pro tools session isn't the equivalent of multitrack tape. Pro Tools file(with the wav files) is the whole session.

I don't understand why people keep arguing about how long will a certain media survive?
Steve, how many times did you revise the sessions you've worked on? I'm not being cynical, i'm totally serious, how many times did you have to go and dig up some multitrack tapes and put them on the machine? What was the gap between when the session was conducted to when you revised it?
I don't know, maybe it's fairly common that people ask the engineer who recorded them to go and revise the session 10 years after it's ended.

tmidgett wrote:Discussion beaten to death many times here.

Steve is right.

Anyone who disagrees is wrong.

I'm not being sarcastic. I'm serious.

Steve is right. But digital recording isn't going to go away because Steve's right. In fact Steve owns one of them devils machines now. So it's every bodies problem now isn't it?

What do you do with the session files that are created at electrical on your devil machine? I know you won't touch it Steve but I assume if it's there then it's probably being used. So it's creating sessions that have to be archived?

I just lost some data recently. And it sucks. But what am I going to do? Thow my rig away?

eliya wrote:I think that any band/artist who think someone will want to revise their work in 50 years is pretentious and thinking way highly of themselves.

Thank you eliya!!!!

Really I feel like if a band wants to record digitally then I'll do it. After it's mixed and mastered they get their drives back and then it's their problem.

As for the music I make myself. I make it. I finish it. It's done. I don't want anybody opening the masters after I'm dead and remixing it. Fuck that.

I made it right the first time!

Steve you want me remixing Shellac? I can put some really cool productiony things in there! I can make it all Los Angeles for you dude.
It'll sound like Orgy when I'm done.