Continuing with CDs?

i was jaded and stressed to high heaven after opening the can of existential worms that was my brief study on digital preservation. probably didn't articulate myself too well. i have a lot of thoughts and feelings on it. i might pick it back up someday but it filled me with such dread! i can't think about things on such a scale. macropuente is completely OTM! about finances and institutional crises, lack of funds & education, etc. digital media may have some worthwhile permanance; magnetic tape, hmm - machines are no longer manufactured, spare parts will run out, and yeah, tape will degrade. i think analogue purists lean toward the theory that analogue decay is a) more flattering in its artifacts and b) easier salvaged than digital decay; you can bake magnetic tape, but once data has rotted, you're fucked. then there's all the concerns detailed above. digital longevity seems possible via multiple & off-site backups, maintaining standards, and further implementation of archival procedures -- and emulation, as noted - but at such great investment and expense, it seems.

i used to be such an analogue purist growing up, but my mindset completely changed: i guess recorded music has only been around for about 100 years. we embraced and committed to the digital paradigm shift. it may be futile to look to the technology of the past to preserve the music of the future. if things are becoming increasingly transient and disposable then so be it.

in dire straits, broke as fuck, i went all-digital with music, photos, videos, writing, etc. two years ago -- i love my laptop, but the tactility of physical media/carriers/tech is something i really miss. i know it's still possible to maintain tape & machines, but sometimes it just feels so pointless, now...

it's funny. i don't feel at all perturbed listening & appraising music within my entirely digital collection, but when it comes to experimenting with sound, i like to engage with tape, still, and feel a bit lost without some sort of analogue in the process. open reel tapes and cassettes are magic and so flattering to music. purely digital composition seems so weird. begs the question: is digital-born media void of tactility, organics, physicality - or are we just redefining those qualities? is digital always virtual and a 'representation' of an analogue?

in armchair theory i make this distinction: we engineered analogue technology to facilitate our needs. digital tech, however, is symbiotic. its intelligence grows the more with interact with it. unprecedented psychological effects of the internet & social media is a prime example that digital technology is developing exponentially at a rate we can't keep up with, despite its growth, intelligence and responsibility being entirely in our hands. but maybe it's natural after all. the universe is math, anyway, right?

ah fucking hell i'm really on one now. i digress. sorry.

https://media.giphy.com/media/vihyZxPIsX5hC/giphy.gif
https://media.giphy.com/media/vihyZxPIsX5hC/giphy.gif

I like thinking about this stuff too but it definitely gets daunting and like really complicated pretty quickly. There’s nothing very reducible or generalizable about it imo. Taken a few digital preservation courses over the years but it honestly seemed too hard (and dry / tedious) to pursue as a career. Now I sell old books lol. Maybe I’ll go back to it though I think I might be more into it / ready for it now that I’m older. Xp

i cant tell you how nice that is to hear from someone else after experiencing exactly that myself during university. it made me want to leave audio/engineering/technology behind altogether. i've diverted my aspiring career aims to cyberpsychology. realized i was more concerned with tech's inter/intrapersonal effects than hypothetical audio nerdery. but here i am, bickering about binary, still!

digital v analog, basically a matter of what crumbles first, the economy/viability of massive server farms... or the environment, humidity, etc.... overtaxed due to massive server farms?! My mind basically goes to a dystopian dust bowl future of rare and expensive books, vinyl, and filled-up ipods alike. Internet and storage media sustainability and growth are the real question marks.

by then no one is going to give a shit about our terrible music anyway

/thread

It’ll only take a single geomagnetic storm/coronal mass ejection to permanently erase all digital media (in addition to seriously fucking up electrical grids, satellite communications, and all related infrastructure). In terms of audio, vinyl is still the only format that can be played without electricity. Theoretically, a paper cone can be used to play a record, which conjures up a dystopian future of people arguing over which type of paper cone produces the best soundstage.

^^^

map also otm throughout

with that in mind, I sure am enjoying the hell out of this new (to me) Elvis Costello CD that I ripped WAV files of, being played through my Dragonfly DAC...

these conditions are such that life itself may involve too much fucking around

cant wait to record a bunch of sex noises to vinyl so that way future civilizations can look back and say, wow, they were horny as HELL

same

if anyone has a second and needs a wtf / lol look up the millennial disc, the golden cd mormons made that will last a thousand years

solving all of these problems

I bought three used CDs today

until jesus comes again xp

wasn't it Sanpaku who was talking about inscribing books onto nickel plates to survive the apocalypse? surely we could do that with records:

https://i0.wp.com/ajournalofmusicalthings.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Cereal-Box-Records.jpg?resize=620%2C350

https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/

What with ripping, transcoding, backing up, importing, cleaning up track names etc there are many many CDs in my collection that I have spent considerable time archiving and zero time listening to in the 4-5 years since archiving them.

i was reminded of a few sites that show you random YouTube videos with few or no hits... I couldn't remember the name of one... and I found this very fitting new one: http://astronaut.io/ Now watching some unappreciated art as my soul leaves my body

this is too cool!

I bought three used CDs today

Yes, because I'm working in the evenings, and am usually not very busy, I got back into browsing for bargains, because bored, and have bought a lot of CDs in the last six months or so, more than I had in the last six years. Mostly new, but some used. I also play CDs all the time at home.

the physical/digital divide is inexistent and misleading, everything is physical.
cds are as digital as the cloud, vinyl isn't. bits on a server farm and our access to them are prone to disappearing as are our cds and photo negatives. cloud is someone else's computer, fuck the cloud, etc

the digital/analogue divide otoh is real but it's not about physical degradation of the underlying medium and playback equipment but about ease and fidelity of replication. you can endlessly reproduce digital information assuming you have the resources for it, not so for analogue

hot takes: writing is digital. paper books are digital information carriers, not analogue, unless they have printed images. digital > analogue for long-term preservation

eventually the internet will host a digital copy of every piece of that humanity has ever produced

always hilarious to see ppl credulously spout this nonsense

yeah with each new major shift in medium, the less there is available overall. see also: movies

exactly. So many comics, books, movies, records that haven't made it through each successive shift

that's true I guess, but there's also a lot of stuff that was pretty much unfindable in the pre-internet age that was eventually uploaded by a random person to youtube or some torrent site or whatever so that all of a sudden it becomes easily accessible to anyone with an internet connection. I am pretty sure that there is a lot more pre-internet media easily available to most people today than there was in say 1995.

^^ This also true. Growing up in the 80s I read about all sorts of music that I just couldn't access.

that is true but it is an altogether different statement

board descrip

there's also a lot of stuff that was pretty much unfindable in the pre-internet age that was eventually uploaded by a random person to youtube or some torrent site or whatever

Until the moment some copyright holder yanks the torrent or the likely-shit-quality YouTube video. Yes, some things reappear, but it's nothing compared to what's lost, and it's even less reliable than traditional physical media. Similarly, if you rely upon Spotify for your new discoveries of old music, you're gonna be SOL when they inevitably collapse.

case in point: that cool Eno documentary about the making of "Here Come The Warm Jets" that was on YT for a couple of hours and now only exists as files on various hard drives

Looks like it's still up here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/z1lqe3b4npusqnv/ENO%20-%20Alphons%20Sinniger.mp4?dl=0

oh, nice, thanks! I was playing the crap out of Warm Jets in the fall and didn't know about this video.

The 'everything ever all the time' hypothesis does rely on some sort of currently unthinkable global rights-holder coordination. It is funny to think that obscure digital titles may eventually be some of the most obscure media of all -- like the above Eno thing. I'm sure I've paid for such little indie films in the pre-Kickstarter era that I would have no idea where to find right now, that never got distributed on disc. Hope I have them on a backup somewhere! Probably not.

download and/or streamrip early. download and/or streamrip often.

holy shit @ that Eno doc btw

ha, I'm glad it got a little revive! it is amazing.

"cds are as digital as the cloud, vinyl isn't"

vinyl doesn't become digital just because the master was. the medium dictates whether the information it contains is analogue or digital. continuous grooves in a platter are analogue, discrete pits and lands in a shiny disc are digital

you can make an 100% identical copy of a cd just like you can exactly transcribe a book word for word but if you feed the output of a vinyl player to an ADC you get a slightly different signal each time

pedantry over, sorry, here's a cool article on the challenges of digital preservation of movies:
http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2012/02/13/pandoras-digital-box-pix-and-pixels/

sure, but if you press vinyl from the original analog tapes there (can be) greater dynamic range than if you press from a digital source as I understood it, plz correct me i I'm wrong. I think there are real reasons that "mastered from the original tapes" is a selling point.

Vinyl and CD require different mastering processes. With vinyl, bass frequencies need to be centered, and heavy bass near the inner groove can make things muddy (or so mastering engineers have told me).

I don’t believe it makes any difference to the dynamic range if vinyl is mastered from an analog or digital source. But if vinyl is mastered from the same master used for the CD — or if it’s mastered from an actual CD (as majors have been known to do) — it’ll sound less-than-great, because it’s not mastered from a source optimized for vinyl.

that makes more sense, thx

There definitely can be real reasons why “mastered from the original tapes” is a selling point, like if there are nth-generation “masters” floating around that the record (CD or vinyl) had been mastered from for however many years. iirc (and I may be wrong about this), In The Court Of The Crimson King had used a not-great master for years until it was finally remastered from the original tapes in 2009 or so.

the whole point of mastering for a particular format is that you optimize for that format. the source is just the source. the higher quality it is the better. often that means the original tapes but it doesn't have to. unless i'm missing something?

I think "purely analogue" LPs these days are quite rare — a new pressing advertised as a remaster from the original tapes probably has a high-resolution digital intermediary, unless it's specifically says otherwise.

And of course the original tape may have deteriorated, e.g., the Hoffman forums were full of complaints about dropouts and other problems on some of the latest Bowie reissues, which I believe used the original tapes (at least where they exist).

tracer otm

analogue tapes have lesser dynamic range than redbook (cd) audio, about 13bit. vinyl has less than that.

it doesn't matter if a vinyl is mastered from a digital or analogue tape source because both exceed its capability

thanks, I see now where I got that mistaken idea from (bad CD mastering):

Despite the lower dynamic range and signal-to-noise ratios a vinyl or tape record can achieve in theory (60-80 dB versus 90-96 dB for CD recordings), vinyl records may still be preferred for their greater dynamic range in practice because of aggressive dynamic range compression used for CD audio material (see Loudness war), however unless the vinyl release specifically notes a vinyl mastering credit it is safe to assume it uses the same dynamically-challenged master as the digital versions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_analog_and_digital_recording

PONO-Mastered Vinyl Or GTFO

I think "purely analogue" LPs these days are quite rare

Tony Allen - The Source (2017) was a fully analogue (AAA) vinyl release. There can't be many others.