Analog multitrack recording is dead...

[UltraJv]

lol I give in

[emdot_ambient]

So what are we to do? Exactly what we are doingDSP

Exactamundo. How many of you have player pianos sitting around? As wax and vinyl recording became available, piano rolls were recorded onto wax and vinyl. Those same recordings were not permanent because of physical wear and tear, and of course the machines used to play them became obsolete. People interested in that music preserved them by putting them on tape, and eventually transferring them to CD. And this is exactly how we're doing things now. Analog tape has become an obsolete technology and it's up to people who care about the music to preserve it by transferring it as best they can onto modern media. Yes, 16-bit wav files, mp3, ogg, aiff and all the other digital storage protocols will become obsolete along with the machines needed to play them. But other technology will take its place and if people still want that old music, they will transfer it onto the latest technology.

At the risk of becoming philosophical, all things in this world are impermanent. Paper crumbles (check out the Library of Congress's work to preserve its archives), stone wears down or is reused for other purposes, matter can be transferred to energy and visa-versa. Welcome to this world.

Now . . . what were we talking about in the first place?

[Sicklecell666]

lol I give in

Oh, come on..You've beena good sport this far..

[Jafo]

I do actually know what neurons are. But no, no-one knows how the data is encoded.

http://www.williamcalvin.com/bk9/index.htm

I, however, can't make heads or tails of it... but then, my degrees are in English and Philosophy. Err, would you like fries with that?

[Sascha Franck]

4) Re-archive your old archives within a perceived window of "media freshness".

And that's the very problem.
Let's assume you had some more or less active studio biz running, recording multiple audio tracks regularly and would want to backup each and everything so it'll last *forever*.

What would you use for that?
Ok, let's assume we'd use CDs (yes, I know there's better solutions, but the problems are the same, just not showing off as quickly).

For a more or less average band recording you could calculate around 0.5 to 1 CD per track. In case you did some heavy choire stuff or bounced a lot of audio instruments as well (to have their sounds when you may not have the instruments anymore) it might easily become 2 CDs per track as well.
So, let's say for a really mediocre audio track count album we might get away with 10 CDs.
If you were running a serious business you would most likely do 2 copies of each CD. That's 20 allready.

Then let's say you would only do 5 such sessions per year. That's 100 CDs.
Now, the average "reliable" lifespan of a burned CD might not be much longer than, say, 5 years - probably even shorter (I've had data CDs that were burned carefully on a SCSI Plextor at 1x only 4 years or so ago - and they had reading errors allready). So to make sure you won't lose data, you would perhaps take them out after 3 years and copy them. In those 3 years you will have produced another 200-300 CDs. After six years there's the first time you will have to copy the double amount of CDs.

Err well, you can allready see where this is going to. If you were running a serious studio busines, after only 10 years (if not less) you'd have to hire somebody ONLY copying and saving data to whichever medium all day long. Let's not forget about all the logistic efforts this is requiring.

As said, there's better mediums than CD, but they all sort of suffer from the same problems.
Right now I'm thinking that HDDs are the best solution. I just checked an old P60 computer with some 500MB drive (running Win 95) a few days ago - the drive seemed to be in perfect condition, and I'd bet it would stay like that for another 10 years.

I've seen an interesting documentation on TV a while ago where they stated that papyrus has got to be the most reliable backup medium ever - more reliable than paper and even more reliable than some rocks.
There's some 4000 (don't remember exactly) year old things written on papyrus which are clearly readable without any problems.
On the contrary, they showed a classical CD which was only kept in an archive (so it might've been played like 5 times) for 10 years - it allready had visible holes in it. Mind you, some extra special edition, pressed under best conditions.
And while audio CD players would still play it more or less fine due to their error correction, this is impossible with data. One missing bit of a zip file and you won't be able to open it.

Now, who's gonna print or write all those 1s and 0s of my songs onto papyrus?

[emdot_ambient]

Right now I'm thinking that HDDs are the best solution.

Definitely. 250 GB internal hard drives can be had for $140 or so. That's $0.00056 per MB. Medical grade CDRs bought in bulk can be had for about $125 for 50, or about $0.0038 per MB. So, CDR's of any decent quality come out at almost 7 times more expensive. So you take your old PC(s) and strip them bare, pack in as many HDs as you can and turn them into file servers. In your hypothetical studio's case, they should be able to easily afford two or three file servers with at least a couple terrabytes of memory total. I mean, I'm no pro and my new DAW has half a terrabyte of storage apart from the system drive.

Or, you could just dump all your tracks on an internet server somewhere because nothing ever disappears once it's on the internet . . . right?