Initial investment, yes. But if you come up with a setup that can last several years, all you'd need to worry about is the actual hard drives, which continue to get cheaper and cheaper. As long as the data is backed up somewhere, you're probably fine...drives fail, but if you stay on top of things and monitor drive health and replace them regularly or at the first sign of any issues, should be fine. I do see articles every so often on the future of large-scale storage. I think there will be better options sooner rather than later to replace spinning hard drives, especially for data that just needs to be stored and protected, and not accessed quickly or regularly.
Microcassette. But seriously, listen to how good this sounds. We are talking about a 40 year old piece of media, playing back a digital copy (CD) via a cheap Sanyo boombox. Wait until the camera pans towards the boombox......quite punchy yes? I am sure that the industry has perfected a tape format that ‘could’ work as well as any digital file. It’s just a matter of trusting an older technology over what is considered “state of the art” nowadays. The microcassette that I used for the video is an “Angrom” tape, a formulation that I suspect is similar to some of the digital A/V tape formats.
really the way this works is you pay iron mountain to worry about it and then never think about it again. this is literally all a company like that does- shoot 'entertainment services' is one of their major pillars, listed right on the front page of their site.
Gee, based on the digital proponents yelling from the rooftops on this forum since the MoFi reveal, I thought digital was indestructible and infallible.
From the horses mouth : How the Rolling Stones’ Massive New Vinyl Box Came Together – Rolling Stone "I didn’t have any original master tapes for this. The management of the band archived everything digitally a few years back, and I was loaned a hard drive – they said, “You can have this for 24 hours; take anything you need off of it, and then it has to come back.” They had several high-resolution transfers of each album, or at least high-resolution where the source was analog tape, which was most of it. They just said, “Take your pick, and work with whichever transfer you feel is better with you.” I’d have liked to have got hold of the tape, but old analog tape is starting to get quite fragile, especially the stuff from the late Seventies and early Eighties, because the tape was not great. Tape from the Sixties is fine, that’s holding up really well, but the Seventies- and Eighties-era tape is getting very fragile. It’s considered nowadays kind of bad practice to continually keep trying to play these old tapes, because you’re just going to wear ’em out. I don’t want to be the person who destroyed the master for Black and Blue, you know? [Laughs] I don’t want that on my conscience! If they’d given me a hard drive full of rotten transfers, I’d have said, “Look, if you want to do a high-quality box, then we have to try and get the tapes out, and see if I can get anything better.” But what I had was good – and in most cases, it was very good – so I was happy to work with what they gave me." I also read an interview with Charlie Clouser (Nine Inch Nails). He has his stuff backed up to the cloud, as well as 14 separate Hard Drive clones in multiple locations.
That's different. The storage mediums in that case failed, not exactly "degradation." I'm sure the digital masters in these cases have many backups to prevent a hard drive or something from failing and said masters being gone forever.
Here's my mantra: Digital is perfect to record and to edit and mix; analog is perfect to store. Can we have both now?
With this "solution" you'll have by default inferior SNR, compared to digital, and tape noise (not mentioning wow and flutter and other issues), so you negate all the advantanges of the digital recording.
I think right at the start of the thread there was talk of the multi-tracks. The kind of thing that has been plundered for box sets. That's the kind of thing that may well have been lost. I'm sure you're right that the masters are perfectly OK in 99% of the cases. We all know stories from the older era where a record company goes bust and everything is put in a dumpster. But that's not going to change.
Back in the 1990s it was DAT taps, (high failure rate if not backed up), then around the late 1990s CD-R, then in the early 2000s DVD-R and hard drives, original parts on floppy disc or Zip drives are basically useless by now, some people backed up to quarter inch which is likely as good now as it was then, there were also one or two that thought Mini Disc was an archive format, though to be fair they will likely still play. As long as the tape, disc, whatever still works you can get pretty much anything transferred by specialists, the problem is that a lot of musicians and small labels have left it too long and even if their data is intact they don't want to spend what it will now cost to copy everything, working DAT machines are becoming scarce. Never underestimate how cheap musicians and small labels can be when it comes to spending on backups. I know plenty of horror stories about 1990s masters getting lost, damaged or destroyed and thee are some DAT masters I've been trying to get my hands on for the last five years that are stuck in a former label owner's non-heated garage, I can only hope the cassettes still play, there are zero copies other than what was released on CD which wasn't everything. The only guaranteed long term medium, even longer than tape, is vinyl.
A properly set up tape deck with good tape recording at 30ips is going to give you a more than good enough copy that should last for sixty, seventy, eighty years, the problem is how many tape machines are going to be around to play the tape back, at least ones that aren't prohibitively expensive.
I liked this, but truly this is breaking down just what the problem is, I really do like the post. OK slightly changing the subject, but not quite, I saw something on my twitter feed. "The Tripitaka Koreana - carved on 81258 woodblocks in the 13th century - is the most successful large data transfer over time yet achieved by humankind. 52 million characters of information, transmitted over nearly 8 centuries with zero data loss - an unequalled achievement." We need to be working on a long term data storage medium that doesn't have to be refreshed.
They do not make good quality standard cassette tape machines anymore. Not for love nor money. Metal tapes were in fact pretty darned good, but even the cheap ones were pretty good by the end. Dolby noise reduction no longer licences the tech.
It seems for big budget stuff, the go to is to put it in three places: 1. Hard Drive 2. LTO Tape 3. Cloud. I believe the big guys use AWS but everyone's got their take on which service is "best" The little guys stick to hard drives and cloud.
I think it is really a lot of worrying over nothing, when a good digital tape format would suffice. Because lets be honest here....how much of a demand will there be in 50 years for a NIN recording or a latter day Bon Jovi album? Precisely zero.
i never thought there would be a demand for abc simple minds depeche mode the cure duran duran erasure go west human league new order pet shop boys tears for fears ultravox and many many more. but 40 plus years later, all of those and more are still be issued multiple times. you have no idea who will want what in 50 years from now. its very possible those bands like NIN will still be re-issued. later -1
My guess is that in 300 years time, 99% of the music we have now will no longer exist in a playable format.
Yeah, but those are bands that are not much older than NIN if you think about it. In 50 years, NIN will be close to a century old. Very few acts from 80 or 90 years ago have much of a demand now for re-pressing(s). Outside of maybe the Sinatra’s and the jazz and country greats. Do you know anybody still buying The Andrews Sisters or Tommy Dorsey?
I've recently heard a company has developed a 1tb cd-sized in physicality disc for the very purposes, i.e. to archive video and audio in hi-rez.
