New Wave Outpost Forum

This is an unsettling article in Rolling Stone about digital recording and its effect on archiving masters:

http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/17389/239965

Thats why i'm old fashioned. I like hard copies of everything. I love my vinyl and I kinda like my CD's. But if music sales go completely digital in the future - I'm out! I will casually pick a song or two off the internet but I will not be paying for ANYTHING if my only choice is a digital one.

Like everyone else I hopped on the digital train very early on, spent about a year of my life converting everything I had to MP3 and was living happily ever after until my first hard drive crash. The majority of my computer's hard drive became completely unaccessible and had to be reformatted which in turn wiped out just about everything. This left me with about 150 unmarked CD-R's of all of my online "finds" and a bunch of pictures with no indexing whatsoever. Everything was Track 1 or Track 6 or whatever. I learned my lesson on that one and the whole digital thing kinda lost its luster after that. I'm still a fan of digital, but I have become quite a wary one.

Yeah, I have Itunes, an I-pod, and a bunch of crap (including a ton of family pictures) backed up on a 1 TB drive right now but it still seems very unreliable to me. I hate the fact that digital storage is basically blind trust. If you go to pull a file off of it and it is not there, IT IS NOT THERE, end of story. In some ways we put the cart before the horse with this whole digital revolution we are currently in the middle of. There needs to be a uniform system of storage that is created for our ever expanding digital media libraries.

Hell, I'm a professional photographer and digital can be the most rewarding format in the world. I love the look and the ease with which we can create our art these days. But digital can also be the most unreliable thing in the world after you capture those images.

I have to back everything up about every three months. For business I always back up old drives onto new drives and rotate them. On the job I've had files go unreadable two days after I shot the picture (and thats with a very very expensive camera). Then you have USB drives that are seriously the riskiest storage format I've ever worked with in my career. At this point I only use them for day to day use, because they can go at the drop of a hat.

At this point in time we jumped ahead of ourselves and put way too much trust in computers and the digital medium. With actual film and analog tape at least you have something to work with if there is a problem on the negative or a glitch on the tape. With digital it is all or nothing. This is the current price of progress. Unfortunately, all of this cutting edge digital is a great short term medium but a very unstable long term one.

Always make actual prints of your prized photos and for now keep your silver (and gold) CD's around, cuz (if you took care of them) they'll be a heck of a lot easier to access than the hard drive that mysteriously stopped working. In the last ten years I've had at least two drives stop for no reason, and another partially corrupted because of an "electromagnetic spike" or "overheating".

Nice to see that Rolling Stone is putting it out there. People should be aware.

But the old media are as vulnerable as the new media are, no? Tape can deteriorate from environmental conditions and/or be ruined by a carelessly placed magnet. Vinyl can warp and be scratched. Digital music files can be lost or corrupted. So what's the difference?
I personally prefer the old media (records, tapes and even CDs) for a few reasons. They're the reasons I preferred them before, do prefer them now and will always prefer them. First, vinyl and tape: I like the sound. I like a bit of crackle and pop with vinyl, and a bit of hiss with tape. There's also value in your music medium being tangible-- there's a certain incomparable pleasure in holding vinyl in your hand, putting it on the spindle and dropping the needle onto it. Hell, even the smell of vinyl, old and new, is worthwhile to me. With CDs and tapes the connection isn't quite the same, but at least (with LPs anyway) there's a sense of the artist's work, how they arranged the songs and so on. With CDs you don't get 'sides' of course but at least you get the artwork, and a lot of music that came out yesteryear is available only on CD and/or is impossible to find on vinyl.
A friend of mine once said (about fifteen years ago) that real music fans remember where they bought their music. I hadn't really thought about it until he said it, but he was absolutely right. That was before the internet had taken over everything, before Myspace, YouTube and the iPod. You might say it's irrelevant now... au contraire-- it's more true now than ever. I feel sorry for the kids nowadays because not only does the music generally suck (and I ain't some old fart who just wants to relive the '80s-- I still look for new music to blow me away now, just as I did when I was 13-- as far as I can tell it just ain't happening), but chances are they also won't have the relationship with their music the way previous generations did. They have shorter attention spans and are too wrapped up in texting, emailing, blogging, blah blah blah. They don't appreciate the pleasure of going to a record shop, sifting through the product and finding that one completely ace record they've been seeking for ages, or simply stumbling across something new.
Sometimes I'm as nostalgic as anyone, but in general I don't give a toss about the '80s any more than other eras. The '80s are as dead as Ronald Reagan. I just love music.
The girlfriend asked me a couple weeks ago if she should get me an iPod for Christmas, and the answer is the same as it always has been: no. The old media are as good as they've ever been, which as far as I'm concerned is plenty fucking good enough.