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Why Steve Albini Still Prefers Analog Tape
CNET's Steve Guttenberg ("The Audiophiliac") profiles prolific audio engineer and general music industry do-it-all Steve Albini; Albini (who's worked on literally thousands of albums with musicians across a wide range of genres) has interesting things to say about compression, the rise of home-recording ("The majority of recordings will be crappy, low-quality recordings, but there will always be work for engineers who can do a good job, because there will always be people who appreciate good sound."), and why he still prefers to record to analog tape. (Note: Albini is justly famous not just for his production work, but in particular for his essay "The Problem with Music.")
Again, they're proprietary. Nothing proprietary can ever be counted on for longevity, so if these recordings were so important, they should have been transferred onto different media as soon as feasible (which probably would have been in the late 1990s with the advent of inexpensive CD-ROM burners for PCs). Yes, back in 1990, you didn't have a lot of choices as digital audio was still confined to high-end professional equipment (except for consumer CD players, which could only play discs manufactured in expensive factories using glass masters), but you've had a LOT of time to rectify this situation now.
And if you kept around a bunch of recordings which require rare and proprietary equipment to read, but you didn't bother to actually keep around the rare and proprietary equipment needed to read them, that's incredibly stupid. Why bother hanging onto the recordings? You might as well throw them all away now since you were too dumb to keep the player. (I can't tell from your previous writings if you kept around a player or not, so if you did, this doesn't apply.) Even if the player stops working, older electronics can frequently be restored to working condition, usually by replacing capacitors.