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His Majesty
You can.
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dcbaQuote
His Majesty
You can.
Did they?
Anyway nothing beats the original media. Can you imagine the curator of a museum plainly saying : "yup 1000's of ancient paintings were burnt to ashes in the fire but that's okay : we still have high-resolution digital pictures of most of them so nothing's really lost!".
The guy would become the shame of his profession...
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StonedRamblerThat's not to blame on digital recordings, it's the labels fault. With digital files you can get an exact one-to-one copy of any digital recording. To save digital master tapes only on one hard drive and to expect this hard drive to work forever is really naive.Quote
GasLightStreet
Welcome to the digital nightmare. Until the 1980s, music was recorded on analog tapes that were stored in vaults and easily played back. In the digital era, that process has changed irrevocably. A new report issued by the Library of Congress calls digital formats “not inherently safe harbors of preservation,” and raised red flags about how music collections are being stored.
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kowalski
That's exactly what's happening with recorded music : even if they don't have the masters anymore, record companies can still issue CD's (or digital download) from copies of copies.
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GivenToFly15Quote
kowalski
That's exactly what's happening with recorded music : even if they don't have the masters anymore, record companies can still issue CD's (or digital download) from copies of copies.
That's not the problem here: of course you can always issue digital versions... The argument is discussed in the article linked above.
Anyway it seems the story is spreading (this time):
Report: Universal Music Group covered up destruction of irreplaceable master tapes in 2008 fire
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kowalskiQuote
dcbaQuote
His Majesty
You can.
Did they?
Anyway nothing beats the original media. Can you imagine the curator of a museum plainly saying : "yup 1000's of ancient paintings were burnt to ashes in the fire but that's okay : we still have high-resolution digital pictures of most of them so nothing's really lost!".
The guy would become the shame of his profession...
I get the idea but I don't think it's fair to compare recorded music that can be duplicated indefinitely to a unique work of art that can't be duplicated.
It would be more fair to compare it to a photograph print and an original negative. You can still make a copy from a print but the quality would be better if you can get the original negative.
That's exactly what's happening with recorded music : even if they don't have the masters anymore, record companies can still issue CD's (or digital download) from copies of copies.
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tumbled
Like the Seed Vault in Norway, there should be a concerted effort to store cultural artifacts and music in a safe location underground. Maybe the government should work on that. We need another endowment for the arts for sure. We shouldn't rely on for-profit businesses to do the right thing. Maybe the Smithsonian should step up and start receiving original pieces. The U.S. Archives already has a great digital library online that is free that has millions of old recordings that are not subject to copyright law.
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kowalskiQuote
GivenToFly15Quote
kowalski
That's exactly what's happening with recorded music : even if they don't have the masters anymore, record companies can still issue CD's (or digital download) from copies of copies.
That's not the problem here: of course you can always issue digital versions... The argument is discussed in the article linked above.
Anyway it seems the story is spreading (this time):
Report: Universal Music Group covered up destruction of irreplaceable master tapes in 2008 fire
That's actually the problem. If you read the NYT article until the end the journalist gets into record companies history of losing or dumping masters since at least the 70's. They don't care - at least until very recently. They can always reissue an album from a safety copy. And most people won't hear any difference anyway. That's what happened in the 80's when they started to put out CD's made from copies and not from the original masters. That's why the original masters were kept in an unsafe place.
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LieB
I'm not an audio archivist, but in all fairness, if the digital copy of an old tape is really well done in very high resolution, it's a practical format to archive. You still have to store it somewhere (and no storage lasts infinitely) but once digital, the music can be duplicated lossless any number of times.
An old tape deteriorates with time and takes more effort to store and preserve. To use it after a few decades, it has to be "baked" in an oven and it's quite some work to read.
So to have only digital copies as archives doesn't have to be bad, as long as all multitrack channels are copied, transparency and resolution is very high and storage is done properly.
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SpudQuote
LieB
I'm not an audio archivist, but in all fairness, if the digital copy of an old tape is really well done in very high resolution, it's a practical format to archive. You still have to store it somewhere (and no storage lasts infinitely) but once digital, the music can be duplicated lossless any number of times.
An old tape deteriorates with time and takes more effort to store and preserve. To use it after a few decades, it has to be "baked" in an oven and it's quite some work to read.
So to have only digital copies as archives doesn't have to be bad, as long as all multitrack channels are copied, transparency and resolution is very high and storage is done properly.
Quite so ...but is the will there to do it...and to keep doing it as the technology changes, so that music is preserved for the future generations who deserve to enjoy it .
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Spud
Yes, controlled storage conditions for old magnetic tape and film stock is critical...but differing tape formulations are also a big factor.
Oddly on the face of it, old tape stock from the '60s and even '50's has tended to survive better than later formulated stock from the late '70s and the '80s...this due the older tape formulations turning out to be more stable over time than the newer stuff.
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StonedRamblerThat's not to blame on digital recordings, it's the labels fault. With digital files you can get an exact one-to-one copy of any digital recording. To save digital master tapes only on one hard drive and to expect this hard drive to work forever is really naive.Quote
GasLightStreet
Welcome to the digital nightmare. Until the 1980s, music was recorded on analog tapes that were stored in vaults and easily played back. In the digital era, that process has changed irrevocably. A new report issued by the Library of Congress calls digital formats “not inherently safe harbors of preservation,” and raised red flags about how music collections are being stored.
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TravelinManQuote
StonedRamblerThat's not to blame on digital recordings, it's the labels fault. With digital files you can get an exact one-to-one copy of any digital recording. To save digital master tapes only on one hard drive and to expect this hard drive to work forever is really naive.Quote
GasLightStreet
Welcome to the digital nightmare. Until the 1980s, music was recorded on analog tapes that were stored in vaults and easily played back. In the digital era, that process has changed irrevocably. A new report issued by the Library of Congress calls digital formats “not inherently safe harbors of preservation,” and raised red flags about how music collections are being stored.
Reminds me of the old digital proverb... there are two types of hard drives: those that are dead, and those that are going to die.