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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."
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.
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.
I do this, too... and, as posted in parent, I'll convert, transfer, everything I have to, it hasn't been a problem in the past, and gets easier as the media handle larger quantities of data.
I think a possible unanswered question, at least for me, is "What if there's nothing that will play mp3's down the road?" I have over 1000 CD's converted to mp3's, but here could be the dilemma.... what if, when mp3's become music format non-gratis, and there isn't any technology available to read and convert straight from my cd collection to the new format? That would imply I'd have to convert my mp3's.... now one generation removed from the original recording, and lossy in compression. Do I have to sacrifice another lossy conversion?
Granted, I'm not expecting to have to deal with this, I'm convinced, maybe naively there are way too many people with way too many cd's and mp3's for this ever to be an issue but I've heard of stores of data on old 9-track IBM tapes no longer readable because there isn't any tape drives or software available to read them. Scary.
And, given the behavior I've seen of RIAA (remember when their job was to protect the quality of our music (e.g., ensuring proper equalization standards on vinyl so reproduction would be as faithful as possible)?), it's not beyond the realm of imagination they'd fight for new formats with little or no warning, and little or no accommodation of bridging old technologies so consumers protect their collections and investments. Food for thought.
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.
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You don't explicitly say so yourself, but clearly in hindsight it would have been a good idea to rip into a lossless container in the first place. There are plenty of choices - APE, Shorten or FLAC. Since you probably compressed at a fairly high bitrate anyway, the loss of space isn't extreme, either.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
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.
Uh, why? .iso file or a collection of open format files (Ogg, Flac, MP3), because chances are very good that I will either be able to find something to play them, or worst case I can write my own =)
The CDDA format is 23 years old, a disk created 23 years ago still plays today. A file created with some off the wall PC format 23 years ago may or may not be playable. I think the only formats I would consider if it wasn't a physical CD are a CDDA
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
So if you have hardware that can handle a medium now, you're guaranteed to have that hardware 40 years from now? Many people with their data stored on 9-track tapes, punched cards, 8-inch floppies, and other such stuff would beg to differ.