Marky wrote:re-input the ones and zeros

Have a good fuckin' time with that, mate.

PCM data format is probably forever in terms of data format readability because it's so seriously vanilla. My bet is that in a future era lacking Studer machines and hard drives, the technique of PCM encoding will have endured. If digital encoding techniques as a whole are not lost, then PCM/WAV will certainly not be lost.

What is currently lacking is the robust physical medium to match PCM's robustly vanilla encoding with.

Seems to me human history is telling us that physically indented inscription is where you get the most years of duty for voluminous communications.

So I'll predict that PCM data, impressed during microfabrication on polycarbon or resin is what's gonna give the cockroaches something to listen to down the road. I see strips or blocks of resin, fabricated with indentations.

Current 3D-printing/microfabrication resolutions are only one order of magnitude away from microfabricating at the capacities of CD substrate, if I read this stuff right.

The key is to not make it edible.

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.

projectMalamute wrote:When was the last time you actually looked in to what was available outside of corporate controlled software?

I do it all the time, and I use a lot of software that is either GPL'd or free because I'm both a cheap bastard, as well as fairly well versed in computer security issues.

If this last bit was true, you'd have discovered Ardour by now.


edit... shoulda kept reading:

D'Piucchstre wrote:

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

Wicked Pissa, thanks buddy!

scott wrote: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've been thinking about this for at least a year.

For it to be a valid business, you'd want to have at least two physical locations to ensure perseverance through natural disasters.

For recording sessions as a whole, it wouldn't be too difficult for a company to keep updating your sessions to the latest file formats, as new releases of software can generally open files from the previous version, if not many previous versions. All it takes is opening the old format with the new program and saving it as the new file format.

The problem is, that's a lot of money to be spending on software, especially considering plug-ins that may have been used... not to mention the cost of hardware.

It actually seems like something that should be sponsored by Google...