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How to Keep Music for Forty Years?
Pinky3 asks: "I recently started digitizing my reel-to-reel music tapes. Most are thirty to forty years old (the first was recorded in 1964). How confident are you that the music you are collecting today will still be playable in forty years? What strategies are you adopting to keep your music safe?"
"I am starting to get worried about having all my music on one 200 GB hard disk. Like most of us, I have had a hard drive die on me in the past. At an Apple store last month a sad young man was in a panic because he had purchased lots of music from the iTunes Music Store while at work. He lost his job, so he made sure all his music was on his iPod. When his iPod died the next month, he lost everything (yes, he should have made a data backup to CD or DVD). At least when one of my tapes deteriorated, I lost only the music on that one tape. Will you be keeping a single repository or writing everything back onto multiple CDs? We all know to keep backups, but we also know that few of us do. Is all your music backed up? In my case, many of my tapes were backups of my long playing records, but they are gone now too.
Another issue is format, both physical and electronic. I am able to play forty year old tapes because I have kept the equipment needed (a 30 year old Tandberg tape deck). (Aside: after announcing that they would no longer produce tape, Quantegy was sold and has begun producing tape again. The initial announcement of the end of production was covered earlier on Slashdot).
I no longer have a 5.25 inch floppy drive, so even if I had kept old floppies, I wouldn't be able to get the data off. I am pretty sure that CDs and DVDs will not be the current media for music in 2045. Are you planning on keeping old players just for your music? Or will you copy everything onto each new format as it appears?
If you are keeping your music on a hard drive, are you ready to copy everything over to a new hard drive every four or five years? Also, what electronic format are you using? Are you confident that (name your favorite format) will still be supported in 2045?
Although I don't expect to be alive another forty years, I would not like to lose my music before I die."
Another issue is format, both physical and electronic. I am able to play forty year old tapes because I have kept the equipment needed (a 30 year old Tandberg tape deck). (Aside: after announcing that they would no longer produce tape, Quantegy was sold and has begun producing tape again. The initial announcement of the end of production was covered earlier on Slashdot).
I no longer have a 5.25 inch floppy drive, so even if I had kept old floppies, I wouldn't be able to get the data off. I am pretty sure that CDs and DVDs will not be the current media for music in 2045. Are you planning on keeping old players just for your music? Or will you copy everything onto each new format as it appears?
If you are keeping your music on a hard drive, are you ready to copy everything over to a new hard drive every four or five years? Also, what electronic format are you using? Are you confident that (name your favorite format) will still be supported in 2045?
Although I don't expect to be alive another forty years, I would not like to lose my music before I die."
If you want to keep it, back it up as many times and as frequently as you feel is necessary. For me, for my music, this means having it on two hard drives and a lot of it burned to CD.
Do I plan on using these hard drives for 40 years? Of course not. If something better comes along I'll convert what I have now to the new format (Like how mp3s came along and replaced CDs for me, I converted the CDs that I liked to mp3). I'll do this as many times as is necessary until I kick the bucket, hopefully a bit more than 40 years from now.
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Copy it over to the latest and greatest technology available. That's about all you can do. Once it's in digital format, that becomes quite a bit easier; you can automate any conversions, and you don't have to lose any information. (No more loss of resolution due to multi-generation copies.) And copying from an old hard disk to a new one is simple. (I've copied my data from drive to drive over several generations of PCs.)
As for backups, I currently suggest DVDs stored off-site. With long-term data like music, you really only need to make one backup, not every week or anything. Although you should test restoring the off-site backups at least once a year.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
And given the fact that I can still find a SNOBOL compiler on the net, I'm assuming I'll be okay for a while (until my hearing goes, and then, oh well...)
Get everyone to mirror your server
Just update over time. As 5.25 migrated to 3.5 people should have migrated (and backed up like crazy since those disks fail so often).
Burn high quality CDs at slow speeds for deeper pits and backup on a couple of hdds, move it to new storage every 5 years or so and add the new stuff you've acquired.
It's easier now than ever to backup but it is also as you said easier than ever to lose your whole collection. I keep 2 backups in a safety deposit box (along with my companies backup data) so I'm backed up in 3 locations (home, work, work offsite backup). It's a chore but only every few years or so...
99% of my Apple ][ disks still work fine and that was from a kid who didn't treat them nicely either. eBay is a good place to find stuff that failed.
I'm sure I'll be transfering my important data to different media more often than just every 45 years.
When cds came out, I moved everything off my floppies onto CDs. This made it more convenient. I could pop in one cd instead of looking through a ton of floppies for what I wanted. Same thing with DVDRs. I'm moving everything onto them to be more convenient. Deleting all the crap I don't care about anymore. As far as file formats, some I don't use anymore. I've usually found something better, and make the switch.
If the data is important, I'll convert it. Hopefully by some automated process. It's an ongoing process. Not something you do every 45 years.
And I've got records from the 50's which still get played.
Personally though, I've just played a game of keeping multiple copies in different places, depending on how irreplacable the content is the more pearanoid I am about spreading it around.
When the data is lost, i'm sure iTunes and Visa will be there. And the RIAA will know what to do (take your money again)
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
I am using MAM-A (Mitsui) Gold archival quality CD's, and I make 2 copies. They are supposed to be good for at least 100 years.
Every time there is a study on CD-R storage stability these test way better than all the others.
MAM-A
Keep it in a lossless format (preferably as simple as possible. .wav is good for this). Keep multiple backups, at least one of which is in a locked off-site storage. Replace the locked offsite every few years with a new copy (to avoid media degredation). Feel free to keep a local cache in a lossy format so you can fit more on a disk.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I'm using multiple Linksys NSLU2's, an embedded linux box designed to be an Bring Your Own USB Disk file server. Out of the box it only provides SMB file sharing, but mine are running the opensource unslung firmware to give me full control over the system.
I'm doing my backups via automated rsync over ssh, to multiple boxes in multiple locations. Each box has a pair of 250G USB disks, and I'm doing a two stage rsync, a remote to local sync, and a disk to disk sync, with the disk to disk rsync being configured to ignore existing files, so if I get corrupt data on the master server, the first tier of backups will get corrupted as well, but the second tier won't.
Cost per location: $90 for the NSLU2, $160 per disk. Total of just over $400. Compared to the other NAS options out there, a pretty good price. I expect to replace the disks when I see the first round of failures, and I'm hoping the nas box will last 3-4 years. At that point it'll be time to look for the latest tech to use.
Forget offline archives. Keep everything "on-line" ie. on an active HDD. When you upgrade your HDD, it's a simple matter of moving everything across & convert formats if something better has arrived (use lossless formats when dealing with the master copy of anything).
The format and longevity of your backups is now not an issue. They only have to last one backup cycle. The physical medium doesn't matter, since if you can write the backups regularly, you can obviously still read them; when a medium starts going out of style, switch before your backup hardware dies. And the data format doesn't matter since you handle that on the primary storage.
With the view that your backups don't need to last in mind, you can now select a backup strategy. Simplest solution is a second HDD for first level, either RAID or periodic sync with a USB/FW drive, and DVD-Rs second level.
And keep your backups offsite.
Opportunity knocks. Karma hunts you down.
Avoid copy protected CDs and DRM encumbered formats like the plague. They're not worth paying for, because you'll never know for how long you'll be able to play them.
Sometimes I wonder: What if I had to bring out my old 386 to play the music I bought 15 years ago? I'd feel cheated, but today people seem to put up with this. They buy DRM-ed files and copy restricted CDs which happens to work on most of today's equipment, but who knows with the computers and CD players of the (near) future? 15 years is not a long time, really, but computers have evolved immensely in that time.
One reason why music can't be compared to 5.25" floppys is because the information is more important to me. I had a bunch of 5.25" floppys that I ended up throwing away years ago. But I didn't care about the information. (I didn't even know what was on most of the floppys). I care enough about my music to make sure that it gets copied regularly.
Plus, my bet is that we are much more likely to see CD players 40 years from now than you think. Reason: backwards compatibility. Since there is so much info on 4.75" optical discs, it is foolish not to include the capability to read them, even as the storage changes. That's why DVD players play CDs and HD-DVD players will play DVDs and CDs. Just too much information, readily accessible and capable of fast and easy duplication (unlike 12" albums and cassette tapes) for the industries to junk them entirely, for probably at least 20 years. The next 20 years after that, you'll be able to find players (just like you can still find turntables that play 12" LPs.
To ensure the future readability of audio files, do not use a compressed file format (mp3, m4a, etc.). Use something that stores the raw data in its most basic form, so that interpreting it in the future will not be a challenge. The filesizes will be monstrous, but .wav may be the way to go.
The Long Now Foundation has done some thinking about these issues. It appears that part of the solution is to engrave everything onto a 2" metal disk.
It might be pricey, but wouldn't it be worth it for your 400th great grand-children to be able to listen to your New Kids on the Block collection?
In case you find yourself having to recover info from old magnetic tapes (which have oxides that increasingly tend to flake-off over time), here are a couple of articles about baking tapes in order to restore the adhesion of magnetic particles to the substrate:
http://www.josephson.com/bake_tape.html
http://www.wendycarlos.com/news.html#baketape
The Wendy Carlos article is particularly interesting to me since it involves the soundtrack to the movie TRON.
FWIW all the CDROMs I have from 13 years ago are still readable. My early 6 year-old CD-RWs are also still working.
As many people have said, just copy everything to new media every time you upgrade, and always keep a backup or two that you upgrade also. It helps that every PC generation has 10x the hard disk space of the previous one.
A different question is whether you'll be able to read the data. I think you should:
1. Make sure there are open-source readers for any format you use (and keep copies of them with the data)
2. If possible pick a simple format that you could reverse-engineer yourself in a pinch (e.g. XML)
3. Pick a popular format so that in 40 years everybody will have the same problem that you do, and you can be sure there will be a solution
I keep my music on hard drives, which I synchronize every now and then. In the coming years, I expect to copy stuff from IDE drives to SATA drives. Later, to whatever replaces SATA.
As for the format, I would recommend FLAC: it is lossless, and open source. So this should last for long. If you see Flac starting to disappear, re-encode to another format, as long as the new format is also both lossless and open source.
Sure, it's bigger than mp3 at 128 kbs, but hard drives are not so expensive.
And of course, do not keep anything with DRM in it. If you can't crack the DRM, there are other paths, like Total Recorder or just going out to your stereo and back into your line input. If done right, the quality loss is minimal, and you only have to do that once. With DRM, you can be pretty certain that a day will come when you won't be able to read it.
Since there are a limited number of songs in the world that everyone listens to, it would be more efficient for everyone to just pool their resources, and backup all of their music to a common area. Then we could use bit torrent to retrieve the files when needed.
...
Paper...I open it up mp3's in notepad and click print
One of these days i'll type it back in, and hit rename on that txt file
Don't put that backup in the same house/building. Take it to somewhere else off-site if it is that urgent. Of course, if Earth blows up, oh well! :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
The whole question is based on false premise. There's lots of media that's advertised as long term, but how do you know that you can find inexpensive tech to play it back forty years from now? You should plan on making complete copies of all your music (and other data) every ten years, just to make sure that it's in a form people still use. Then you only have to worry about finding media that lasts you ten years -- though to play it safe, you should add an extra decade safety margin.
How confident are you that the music you are collecting today will still be playable in forty years?
A better question: How confident am I that I'll actually *want* the music I'm collecting today to be playable in forty years?
Direct away from face when opening.
Your query is a subset of the problem discussed by Bruce Sterling's Dead Media Project.
Basically, you should transfer to new formats as they arise.
Like I've always said, if you don't have off-planet back-up, you don't have back-up. :-)
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Ha! Sure DVDs, CDs, multiple hard drives, the web and so forth may be 'convenient', something will surely happen eventually. The answer is to go back in time, back before transistors, back before magnetic tape! I'm talking flip flops made out of relays. Buy a bajillion relays, and bit by bit, transfer all of your music on to them. Use some early form of error checking to ensure you will still have it should one or two die.
That or go buy some punch cards or write the song down bit by bit and write them back again later.
I always thought it was a mistake thinking in term of having the data in a vault somewhere. It is more like a dynamic process: each time you get a new storage technology, you just copy the data on it. There is no question of perennity, I stil have my 1990s files.
The two remaining questions are: failure of the technology you are currently using, and file format. For the former, just triple the backups IN DIFFERENT PLACES (think about fire, tornadoes, flood, angry ex-girlfriend) I personally backup all important data on two CDs + on a remote computer by network. For music I guess you do not need an every-day basis, thus you could just burn two dvds every month and send them by post to you parents / collegues / whoever you can trust. If you really need a lot of space, you can use a fire-wire hard disk or whatever that you can put in a remote location.
Remain the file formats. For those, if you chose standard there should be no problem of playing those sounds, thanks to open-source. The only issue I can see is simply that in 20 years from now your 44.1khz will be pretty rough compared to the standard we'll have. Though if your recording are on 20 years old magnetic tapes, sampling may not be the main problem.
Finally, considering what seems to be at the horizon (100Gb DVD ? 850 Gb DVD ? they may exagerate a bit, but eventually we'll have those), storage will soon not be a problem anymore for music.
Cheers,
--
Go Debian!
Analog tape has its advantages. The technology is relatively simple and high-quality tape can last for many decades if stored properly. You can still get replacement heads, although you might cringe at the price. A tape transport could be built from scratch for much less money than more technologically sophisticated devices. Many old tape transports were built to last. I know of many that are still in daily use, even though they were purchased in the 1970s.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Just post torrents to it.
You'll be able to retrieve it any time you want from the gazillion people who downloaded it.
Course you'll have to lie low from the RIAA for a while.
How about a RAID 1 with all wav files?
Science is but a perversion of itself unless it has as its ultimate goal the betterment of humanity. -Nikola Telsa
"How to keep music for three years"
This means:
- Moving from a 3 year old device/media to a new device or media (always!)
- Converting to a new unDRMed, lossless format if necessary
Compare that to museum artifact maintenance, which require regular upkeep and ideal storage conditions. I you care about your data you must maintain it.If it's really important, just save it to a wav and keep your hardware. Save it on a hard disk and keep the computer. You can always get the analog signal back that way, and all you have to do is hold on to the computer. Machines 20 years from now may not recognize the drive, so you'll need the original machine, and wav is lossless.
And put it in a safe deposit box or something. ... or here's an idea. Go to all the fast food restaurants in your area and steal napkins and toilet paper and then use that to make punch cards and you can manually copy all your digital music into hardcopy. Then you can go bury that in woods (digging the hole with your bare hands, of course) and it will be there in 300 years when you need it.
I'm so tired of people whining about some stupid little problem that could be easily solved by spending a relatively small amount of money.
Just 4 of my favorite forces of Nature.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
What I've been doing with my school report backups: GMail them to yourself.
I have basically two kinds of music: music that I really dig, and the music that is more on the temporariry basis on my collection.
The music that I really dig is of the kind I could listen to in say 10 years.. maybe in those 40. Maybe 50 % of that music is known enough that I could be able to rebuy it somewhere in World now or say in 10 years. That music exists in various backups: CDs, DVDs, 3-4 hard drives, backupped on my bf's HD as well. And some of the music that I really, really, like has been also CDed to some of my closest friends.
But the other category goes far without precaution. It is music that I listen to, but that is not really something I care for. Why backup that? I consider that as needed to store as the music I would hear on radio. It's there as long as I like, then change it.
I rarely buy music on CDs - and when I do, I give most of the times the CDs away. So the friends will have a more material copy of my CDs (the original CD, while I have only data), in case that I would need an access of those later.
Not everything is for sure worth keeping for. Just as how and why would you want to store all your 1970s or 1990s clothes? Besides, the most annoying music - top 40 - never seems to die. So even if you personally take care to NOT backup anything even remotely sounding like Britney Spears, Ricky Martin or Backstreet Boys, what do you think you will be hearing in the radios when you are in an old people's home in 40 years?
Convert it to base64, and post it to Usenet. Rely on groups.google.com to keep it around forever. If you are worried about the copyright police, encrypt with pgp before conversion to base64.
Even if you no longer have the means of playing your music, whether it be off of reel-to-reel or a CD (at some point in the future), there will always be ways to transfer formats.
Just like some camera shops maintain a side business of doing VHS and DVD transfers of old 8mm film, there will be companies that will do the same thing with music and obsolete video formats in the years to come.
However, if you'd like to avoid paying someone, I recommend capturing everything to your HD in whatever your favorite format is, and then creating a backup of that on DVD. Don't toss your reel-to-reel tapes (just in case), just store them someplace that's out of the way. If you have a safe deposit box, store a copy of your DVD's there.
Off site and multiple backups are the only way to safely store things in the even of a fire or natural disaster.
If you want to get paranoid, you can setup an IDE mirroring raid with two harddrives.
Various-capacity drives using this technology have been around for a decade or two, and each new generation has been backwards compatible with all the previous generations. (Just decide if you want 5.25 or 3.5 inch; the current 3.5 format is up to about 2.3Gb per disk, drives run around $300, and the removable disks are maybe $20 each, depending on vendor. The technology itself is based on a natural phenomenon that geophysicists use to determine the orientation of the Earth's magnetic field millions of years ago. I'd say that counts as GREAT data retention!
For, I dunno, 60 years, people have been dealing with the safe storage of music; you are neither alone nor is this a new problem, and finally it most certainly is not a problem without a solution. If you want to, it can be done.
.wav file carved into it with a pen knife: they are all stubbornly analog media (that just happen to be storing digital data) and it's the health of the analog media you need to worry about.
Now, we need to get one thing straight right off the bat. You might be worrying about what digital format to use. Personally, I'm not going to wade into that much except for some sage advice: use a commercially viable format. In other words, RedBook CD players will be around in 50 years, somewhere, somehow.
They might be expensive, they might be hard to find, but they will be there somehow. I can't say the same for any computer-based format, nor could I say that for newer digital formats that might not get CD's traction. DVD-Video is another possibility (not DVD-Audio or SACD; they are still too vulnerable. But DVD-V offers good audio recording quality (48Khz sampling rate for 2-ch audio) and longer record times than CD).
Basically, if a record or movie label didn't sell lots (and lots and lots) of content on it, don't expect it to be around later. If they did, you might have to hunt down a 21st century librarian to help you, but there will be a way.
Part two, is this:
Forget about digital.
No, not what you're thinking. I'm here to point out that whether it's a CD, a hard drive, or a frisbee with a
Which brings us to the same stuff we've been dealing with for the last 50 years. Archival storage, or a close as you want to get. That can be complicated depending on what you've got to store, but it comes down to a few basic points; follow them and you will be fine, barring accidents.
I'm going to outline the basics; dig deeper if you want (some media need specific care; eg magnetic tape should be near but above freezing. Then again, freeze it and do the other two, and it will be in way better shape than if you stored them in the basement).
Cool. A freezer is a good idea for most media. Either keep it as near to 32F/0C as possible but above freezing (not so good for food, so we're talking dedicated storage), or run it colder and Just ignore your sealed box of music files when you go for the microwave pizzas.
Vertical. Store disks, tapes, etc on edge, not flat or laying on top of one another.
Sealed. Use acid free materials (plastic often is fine here; paper won't be unless it's special and expensive) and don't forget to tape it up air-tight. Remove paper labels, CD sleeves, etc and store separately if you want.
As for marking, I would suggest marking in some non-destructive manner, like on the case of the disk rather than the disk itself. You're not going to be playing them, so you shouldn't have to worry about losing track of which disk goes where.
Do include a little list of what is on the things (or as much info as you like; no-one will mind), but perhaps in it's own plastic bag. Make other copies for playing with.
I started to buy CDs in 1992, now some of my oldest and favorite albums are already starting to fail. I can't rip some tracks any more.
Today I own more than 2.000 CDs, more than half of them are out of print. I'm starting to digitalize my collection, so I can have access to it later. My plan is:
The Library of Congress has a webpage that details how to preserve all sorts of collections. Many of us have extensive collections not of just music but also books, photographs, etc., and preservation can be just as important as duplication.
Anakin Simpson: If you're not with me, then you're my enemy--ooh, donuts!
This may be a silly idea given the kinds of error correction already on a CD, buy what if you convert to lossless flac, split everything up with rar and add some par archives to the cd. Each par archive can recrete one missing rar archive, so if one gets hosed on the cd, it won't matter. I guess you could burn the data twice, but if both pieces get hosed in both locations you're done. What I don't know is if CDs and DVDs can go out in spots w/o affecting the rest of the data integrity. I'd expect them to, but you never know.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
every conversion between lossy formats throws away quality. avoid them unless you are really tight for disk space.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Why not just store source code for a Vorbis decoder on the same disc? Or are you claiming that C and the machine languages in which compilers are implemented will become dead languages within the next 40 years? Heck, Fortran is still around.
First, always rip in a lossless format. Other people have mentioned some. Just pick any one that's open source and popular (I recommend FLAC).
Second, store them on a RAID. I recommend RAID 6 . It's a lot like RAID 5, which is becomming more popular with real archivists and can sustain mutliple drive failures without outrageous performance and storage overhead. It requires some investment in hard drives, but honestly they're so damn cheap that's no big deal.
Your cheapest solution will be to go SATA as there are several very large drives available for little money and more and more hardware RAID cards. Quite frankly the system will be fault tolerant so spending lots of money on more reliable SCSI drives is a waste. And do buy an excellent hardware RAID 6 card. Software RAID 6 has incredible overhead making the computer a dedicated file server that can do little else.
Check out RAID solutions. Particularly RAID 6 (which is very similar to RAID 5).
I started converting all my CD's to MP3 a few years back, and I haven't gone back to the originals since I stored them a couple of years ago.
.Mac works good, or rsync to another drive.
:)
Encoding in the same format and having an organized directory tree keeps life simple also - Artist->Album>Tracks. I started encoded @ 192, and decided to switch 320kbps about a year ago.
Going with something very openly accepted makes life easier. Everyone does MP3, but a lot of people are really down OGG. (Perhaps someone below me can go more into OGG and why it might be better in the long term over MP3.)
I've found a lot of really rare recordings over the years - mostly @320, and I'd hate to loose these gems... so backups are important. Nothing elaborate - if you work with Macs backup.app through
Having all my media available digitally is the best. I can take my entire collection with me anywhere, give to friend when they go 'I gotta get a copy of that from you', and it'll still sound fresh even when my adult diaper doesn't
Just run any good P2P client, with decent hashing (most gnutella & ed2k clients should do). Share all your files, and save a list/db of all the sha1/ed2k hashes (which shouldn't take a lot of room, and you can print it, or save it on a floppy).
If you ever lose your HD, you'll be able to redownload all the MP3's from the network you uploaded to (if the files are in demand, obviously).
Make sure you use an open standard like Ogg vorbis or FLAC, by the way.
-l
As music formats, medium, ad nauseum goes the way of the Do-do, I imagine you will have to convert between new formats. Take mp3 for example, how many of us convert from mp3 to ogg? This will not change if you should wish to preserve them. I am quite sure you will no doubt hold on to your r-to-r for acoustics you just can not reproduce. Some will claim you can not tell the difference others will swear it isn't the same. Grab a remastered copy of Billie Holiday and have a listen vs. an LP. Some is enjoy the crackling and popping of an album.
As for your issue about backing them up, by all means do. If you have to convert between the new file formats I think it is a small price to pay in order to preserve your music. As for the electronic back ups, I suggest a raid array to prevent hd loss, this may seem extreme to some people, a raid just to preserve music. Though if this guy has taken this much care to maintain his collection this long I am sure he would go the extra mile. Also with harddrives as inexpensive as they are now, and most newer motherboards supporting some type of raid out of the box, you could bring this to fruit for a few hundred dollars.
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Find yourself a shellac disk, and cut the audio waveform into the surface of that disk.
I have a 78rpm version of this archive method that was created in 1910, and it still plays the music just fine.