Premier Rock Forum

Anthony Flack wrote: Thu Aug 29, 2024 5:15 pm Text is digital; you can reproduce it as much as you like. As I mentioned, The Iliad, The Republic and Euclid's Elements have stuck around to this day. Nice.

Text on a computer is digital. Text in a book is analog. Digital does not mean reproduce-ability; I have two 1/4" machines and can make copies all day of tapes.

Anthony Flack wrote: Thu Aug 29, 2024 5:15 pm

Now if you recorded your multitrack recording with files that have exactly the same start time, no plugins, no overdubs/edits, into .wav files all in the same folder with clear labels (or you always always burn stems that do exactly this), then your may have created a session that some future DAW or whatever takes its place can reconstruct

Hang on, it's not a case of if you do all of that you MIGHT be ok. If you do all of that you will have definitely created something that ALL future DAWs would be able to reconstruct perfectly with no effort whatsoever. You won't do all of that, but there's a pretty severe double standard being applied here. You don't get any information about the mix or outboard effects on your tape, but that's ok because the "workflow" means you write it all down and of course you don't lose it and of course you have access to all of those outboard effects in the future. But if a plugin isn't present, never mind that the workflow includes automatically writing human-readable files that tell you exactly what they all are and the worst case scenario is that you have to use a different effect. Meanwhile assuming the digital "workflow" dictates we all become Skrillex and the edit will be really complicated and raw takes will be useless.

I followed this point by describing how extremely rare this is. Almost nobody does it. They finish their record, they mix it down to a 2 track file, and it's all usually some level of a disorganized mess that requires having the original DAW & OS & plugins to be able to reconstruct the multitrack in the future. Because making a record is expensive and hard and time consuming and alien to most folks. When they're done with it, they want to have and share the music, not go through (or pay someone to go through) file-cleanup.

I have continued to follow this thread and it just gets more and more strange. Why search for illuminating comparisons in film or text or what have you? The best evidence we have is the lived reality of thousands and thousands of musical projects. There's no need to construct an analogy. Analog tape is a robust and pretty straightforward technology and it has proven itself well as a solid method to store what's been recorded immediately after the session is done with no work beyond labeling stuff. (And even then, one can figure out pretty well what's on an orphaned reel.)

Digital recording does not offer a physical master, is proprietary to various degrees, is usually fucked entirely if there's an error, and requires time and diligence to approach the level of future accessibility of a reel of tape. Yes, you can pretty easily make lots of copies of digital sessions and spread them to the wind. I'll repeat myself - in my experience, ubiquity does not equal future-proofing. It often means multiple copies of different versions floating around or archival spots that become inaccessible in the future. It frequently results in uncertainty (which one is the FINAL version? Who has the password to the band's old Dropbox account?) While this can be avoided with real attention and diligence, most people simply don't do it.

And I'm not going to enter into any discussion here about "AI is probably gonna solve it for us anyway" because that has gotta be the laziest thing one can say on the matter.

To mistake copy-ability with permanence puts the longevity of the majority of music being made today in real danger. I honestly think this is a real tragedy. One of the real contributions that this studio/forum broadly and Alibini in particular offered is a counter-trend insistence that we do not need to treat so much music as ephemeral, unimportant, replaceable. This is a weird and seemingly backwards idea when one first hears it - that we should persist with a proven approach when Garage Band is so easy to use. But the argument absolutely holds up upon scrutiny. Despite the more common use of WAV file formats and cheap storage, nothing takes away from the core point made on the RADAR 24 thread nearly 20 years ago: music, especially non-obvious oddball music, is worth preserving and the best way to do that is to commit at least one version of it to professional analog tape.

= Justin

Justin Foley wrote: Wed Sep 04, 2024 9:31 pmRADAR 24 thread nearly 20 years ago

I read through the remnants fairly recently and just want to plug how usable and great the archive is still, even despite the condition.

(I’m not making an analogy to digital archiving, but I feel like I’m in there all the time.)

The sad part about the RADAR format is that it actually was a dedicated professional recording platform and not a box of software you also browse porn on. Maybe with maturity some of these long term concerns could have been addressed, but digital is always a race to the bottom of faster/cheaper/more convenient and it couldn't compete. I believe this model of own nothing/subscription-based everything will one day come back to bite us in ways beyond recorded music.

penningtron wrote: Thu Sep 05, 2024 6:44 am The sad part about the RADAR format is that it actually was a dedicated professional recording platform and not a box of software you also browse porn on. Maybe with maturity some of these long term concerns could have been addressed, but digital is always a race to the bottom of faster/cheaper/more convenient and it couldn't compete. I believe this model of own nothing/subscription-based everything will one day come back to bite us in ways beyond recorded music.

Radar was a solution perfect to maneuver people who came up recording to a tape machine directly through a console into the digital domain. It was a 1:1 stand in for a Tape machine and could be dropped in place of one with minimal alteration of your workflow, and you could mix out of it just as you do on tape. If you wanted to sync 48 tracks of orchestra recording to a tape machine it might have been the most stable way to do it. Shit got weird when you actually had to hire an editor to actually edit on one using a keyboard. I only saw it in real life once and it looked like a nightmare, but the dude was pretty fast. Once people moved to Radar and were comfortable with Digital as a thing, it wasn't too much of a hop over to Protools and the explosion of the plug in market was a hell of a siren song. Radar was kinda doomed from the start from a longevity standpoint, but I think it was a pretty rad idea and still kind of an appealing one. A used Tascam or Alesis 24 track recorder can be had for next to nothing and I've thought about it, if you can convert to modern hard drives, because I think they are made for IDE or evan SCSI.

Text on a computer is digital. Text in a book is analog. Digital does not mean reproduce-ability; I have two 1/4" machines and can make copies all day of tapes.

Text in a book is digital. If you copy the text, letter by letter, you copy the book. The 1/4" machines make analogue copies which unavoidably degrade with each copy made.

Consider this game:



They don't do this in the experiment, but I think if the drawing had included a line of text, then the line of text would still read the same at the end. That's analogue vs digital.

The rest seems to be covering ground we already covered and I don't really know what to add except to say it again. To say that common file formats won't be inaccessible in future, the 2050s won't be doing things the same way as the 1950s, and any consideration of data management in future which doesn't mention AI is already stuck in the past. If you don't take high-speed internet into account, that's talking about a world that is already long gone.

I don't think looking at how other data is stored as an "analogy". It's a pretty big claim to say that the archival format for music in the decades to come is going to be on analogue magnetic tape, while absolutely every other form of data in every other industry will be digital. Writers aren't printing out all their writing in paper form to store in a filing cabinet. Filmmakers aren't printing all their edits to 35mm reels for safekeeping. All over the world, in all kinds of industries, people are dealing with more complicated data than a recording session and as far as I'm aware nobody has decided that printing that data to analogue tape is the way to go.

Actually I doubt that many people making music are printing things to magnetic tape any more either.

If you think that the text in a book, as in the ink on the page, is a digital representation of the words, then I understand why we can’t come close to agreeing.

What you’ve just said is objectively, and categorically false.

it’s weird seeing a kind of argument in the Tech forum.

That other industries have also been wooed by ephemeral digital formats (for cost, laziness, the usual reasons) is not evidence that tape isn't a proven storage medium for recordings. Film isn't my world but I wonder if there are industry equivalents of Steve Albini, Walter Sear, etc.

The text thing as an.. analogue to digital recording is too ridiculous to even unpack.

llllllllllllllllllll wrote: Thu Sep 05, 2024 6:23 am

Justin Foley wrote: Wed Sep 04, 2024 9:31 pmRADAR 24 thread nearly 20 years ago

I read through the remnants fairly recently and just want to plug how usable and great the archive is still, even despite the condition.

(I’m not making an analogy to digital archiving, but I feel like I’m in there all the time.)

The fate of RADAR sorta proved the point regarding proprietary digital multitrack formats.

One thing I would say in digital's favor...

If you have a playable CD of an album, you have a serviceable digital master and can make clean vinyl records from it.

Is it going to sound as good as a new master made through modern converters off an actual master? No.

But it works. A lot of reissues we buy in stores today are cut off CDs, especially albums made in the early to mid 90s.

It's a nice feature of a much-maligned format that has gotten a lot more palatable to me as pro digital audio improved and the quality of consumer-grade CD players went up, over the last 15yrs or so.

I still buy most everything on LP but I often also buy the CDs when I can find them for cheap (and they're usually cheap if I can find them at all).

Making records, I don't care if it's tape or digital as long it's a good signal chain and I have the mixed record on a 1/2" tape with a bunch of digital backups in various places.

Just use digital recording at this point. Analog is over.