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Cheers @duotone , the first video is well worth watching, I left it open in a tab on my browser, and just came back to it in 20 or 30 min chunks when I was in 'the mood', I would highly recommend doing something similar as there is so much good information to take in, without hitting overload.
Still, that aside...interesting guy
http://www.itbusinessedge.com/cm/blogs/mah/is-tape-still-relevant-for-smbs/?cs=45557
There IS a good argument to be made that tape is a more secure long term storage medium - sure, there are problems with sticky tape shedding etc, but I think it's quite telling that things like the Beatles' masters can still be played as long as they're properly treated beforehand.
In contrast, if a hard drive lasts 5 years we tend to be happy. In the amazing world of digital, we often forget that the hardware is mass produced, usually cheap as possible. And there are still age related considerations; the platters of unused hard drive are liable to seize up. If a solid state drive's control chip breaks, the data is much harder to recover. CD-rs I burned when I was 18 don't play any more with any kind of reliability, because the physical artifact degrades. I have two DAT tapes from my uni days - I also remember using a VHS 16-track ADAT recorder. Unless I remembered to take old files with me as I've moved through desktops, laptops and tablets, those files are lost to me. Obviously this last one is down to personal organisation but when you're dealing with artists, it's a real issue.
And that's just the hardware side. Look at software. Look at planned obsolescence. Look at security licenses for plugins. I see forum posts all the time about, say, an Ilok that has been lost or just stopped working in the middle of an important session. About software authentication that breaks, and leaves people desperately calling tech support to see what's going on. About software that has support discontinued, and then a few years later you find yourself with an operating system that will no longer run it.
Personally, I have no confidence that the mix session I was working on at the weekend will be able to be ran by me in five years time. Even if I take my computer, put it in a box and don't use it - something will break. The hard drive will have failed, or one of the programs that needs a license will have broken either by accident or design and fail to open. If I keep using the PC and stay on the upgrade path, eventually something will break in terms of backwards compatibility.
Maybe it won't.
But if I have clients paying me money, I'd definitely be paranoid about it. They say data's not safe until it's backed up in three physical locations, but most locations, in the long run, will have the same systematic flaws.
Me, personally, I'm not a luddite and I think it just comes down to how much you care about this stuff. But I think Albini's views there are perfectly valid - if you use tape, real analogue gear, and have the skills to maintain it, then that's a very safe way of making sure you can re-create a mix session in the future. Unless you die.
I think, though, his views are borne of a certain attitude to the creation of the art, and he has interesting views about the place of the recordist in the whole process, and how the process does or doesn't influence the artist.
Bandcamp
Spotify, Apple et al
1 - How many machines capable of playing those tapes existed 30 years ago?
2 - How many exist today?
3 - How many will exist - to take his example - in 100 years?
4 - How easy do you think it'd be to integrate an open source algorithm into a music player in 100 years' time, compared with building a tape machine from scratch?
The code to playback WAV and FLAC formats is open source and stored in hundreds of thousands of places - if not millions - and is trivial (for somebody with basic programming skills) to integrate into any system; even if every copy of that code was lost, the specification exists in just as many places. A file stored on any medium is 100% representative of how it was stored; as long as you can retrieve it, there will be no degradation in quality, and permanent storage is trivial in many ways (eg flash memory), not to mention the fact that most online storage is both redundant and error-correcting.
Contrast that with the expense of preserving tapes correctly - permanent temperature and humidity control, making sure nobody walks past with a strong magnet in their pocket etc
Beyond that, it's absolutely trivial to store such data in more than one place, or even many places (both physically and virtually) and costs practically nothing. Try doing the same with magnetic tapes - find another facility with the same environmental controls etc, then ask how much they charge...
My point is that his arguments are those of somebody who actively doesn't want to understand what he's arguing against (as he himself admits), and that annoys the snot out of me; he has a certain authority associated with his words, so when he speaks he has an obligation to at least make an effort to understand instead of spreading ignorance.
@Cirrus - yes, Google (and many other companies) still use tape backups, but they're refreshed very frequently such that the longevity of a single tape isn't an issue. My experience of tape-based backups from around 10 years ago is that roughly 40% of tapes are damaged to the point of being useless by the time you come to need them (admittedly, Murphy's Law is involved here at some point along the line). Whether it's mechanical failure in the player, tape quality or some other catastrophe...they're not as reliable as people tend to believe.
My personal gripe with his attitude on this particular issue, I do like his views on pretty much everything else
I also think that having a position on this gives him a USP, so from a business standpoint it makes sense - though I'm sure he's genuine and not cynically peddling a line, he definitely has a lot of visibility because of his views.
Bandcamp
Spotify, Apple et al
He touches on the archiving thing at the end - his point is that an analog tape machine could theoretically be re-constructed in some post-apocalyptic world (and gives an example of a tape machine that was built from plans in a garage in Soviet Russia). In such a situation, it would be totally impossible to build, from scratch, something capable of understanding a WAV file, no matter what medium it was stored on.
My point is that even in 20 years, there will be almost no analogue tape machines left. There will, however, be millions upon millions of computers, all of which are capable of reading WAV files. His argument is ludicrous, born of the fact that he fundamentally doesn't understand the technology.
In 20 years, a band that's recorded a record on analogue tape will have a tape of their session. I'd be surprised if there weren't still some tape machines around.
A band that's recorded digitally, will, if they're lucky, have a session which consists of a subfolder of hundreds of little wav files that contain snippets of audio. Assuming, that is, they have maintained their backups over two decades against failing hardware etc. The only way to assemble them back into the right arrangement, short of forensic work, will be if you can open the DAW session file.
Bandcamp
Spotify, Apple et al
You can also store it in as many places as you like, for trivial cost.
With Reaper, for example, you could trivially do this for every version of a take. That ain't happening with tape.
In any case...the other problem with the "apocalypse" scenario is that proper tape storage without degradation requires pretty strict atmospheric controls, which ain't likely to be there in any situation where computers aren't also there
You don't just need a tape machine, though - you need a fully-functioning, well-maintained tape machine which you can be sure won't stretch, damage or destroy the only copy of your session that you own.
There might be a few thousand of them kicking around now, just 15 years after digital recording started taking over.
Sure, if you can't find one, just build one as Albini says. The build of the new one would have to be identical to the one used to record it. What head spacing would you use? Do you know how the tracks are physically laid out on the tape? How fast should it play back?
Just like the WAV, you'd need specs. The problem is that the specs for a tape machine which is no longer required by the bulk of society (to the extent that even now they could quite accurately be described as "equivalent to unicorn poo") are self-evidently going to be lost long before the specs for something which is used by every computer (approx. 2 billion of them) and every mobile phone (about 6 billion of them...yes, really) in the world.
Sure, you could just figure it out by experimentation, but you're likely to destroy at least one tape copy of something in the process.
Even as a thought experiment, his scenario is absurd.
Very interesting and revealing comments about Page and Plant here.
I could listen to him all day.
It applies in most fields, especially with the proliferation of digitisation of original material, or as digital originals.
There is another thread which explores some of these issues more...
http://thefretboard.co.uk/discussion/95238/future-proofing-our-intellectual-property#latest
I started out with tape and there is a lot to recommend it but the whole industry works on being able to recall settings forever.
I'd love to have the luxury of being able to work in analog and treat each mix as a performance but it simply isn't possible.
Albini can because he has a unique position in the industry- sure, he created it (and I very much respect him and his position on this) but for the rest of us jobbing producer/engineers it isn't a practical reality.
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