Slashdot Mirror
Testing Old Tapes To Save Them
JMarshall writes: Recordings on old audio tapes won't be worth much in another 20 years, and some are already too degraded to play. A team including members from the Library of Congress report that infrared spectroscopy can noninvasively separate magnetic tapes that can still be played from those that can't, without risking the tapes by sticking them in a player. Unplayable tapes can sometimes be rescued by heating, which can make them playable for long enough to digitize. This method could help archivists identify which tapes need special handling before they get any worse.
We can read back the hippie mix tape Richard Nixon prepared for Howard Hunt.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
No thanks, I'll stick with my analog hole.
What digital medium is presumed to be readable 20 years hence?
If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire the A-Team.
They are wanted in the UK.
There rap sheet is a long list of 10 year sentence for copyright for each song / piece of work.
You're my only hope !
Save Our Sextapes
Nothing like nostalgia of tape media to make one feel old.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
The abstract actually says "Minimally Invasive," not Non-Invasive (the goal) Aparently the technique analyses small sections of tape to see if the physical media has degraded. Not sure how that tells us *anything* about the magnetic state of the media.
Clever people have used scanners to take a picture of a phonograph record and then play the image of the grooves.
They have smart phones that can fake swiping a mag stripe card, just by holding it up near the reader.
I wouldn't be surprised if some clever person could figure out a way of playing the sound recorded on the tape without actually having to unwind the tape.
One cannot discuss tape degradation with mentioning The Disintegration Loops by William Basinski.
Recordings on old audio tapes won't be worth much in another 20 years, and some are already too degraded to play.
Looks like the RIAA was right all along -- THAT's why you should rebuy all of your music, because soon your original license to listen will have vanished.
"The palest ink is better than the best memory" -- but not when the ink seperates from the paper!
Wait -- does that mean my 8-track RAID array is in danger!?!
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
The magnetic state is not likely to be a significant issue,provided the tape is not exposed to excessive heat or strong magnetic fields (like from lightning currents in a nearby structural element or having the storage box sitting on the floor next to an industrial-scale waxer's drive motor).
While really small domains can be "squeezed out" by their neighbors (perhaps eventually attenuating really high frequency material and/or resulting in a bit of cross-talk between layers in the tape as wound for storage), the larger-scale domains on mag tapes are comparable to those in the same magnetic materials as minerals: Those are stable for geological time - and indeed are how geologists tracked the Earth's magnetic field-reversals.
The problem with mag tapes is mainly the degradation of the physical media - the glue that holds the magnetic material to the tape, and the tape itself.
I recall a story about a misadventure at Mobile Fidelity Sound. This is a company that makes extremely high quality recordings from original master tapes. A typical operation was to use specialized low-noise equipment to cut a master at half-speed, and press it into ultra-pure, super-hard, "supervinyl" for low surface noise, undistorted playback, low wear, and environmental stability. Such a master, and copies made from it, are substantially more faithful reproductions of the input signals than magnetic master tapes.
They were making a new vinyl disk master from a very early rock record's master tape. As the cutting proceeded, they noticed that, beyond the playback heads, the capstain/pinch roller drive's bending of the tape was causing the oxide to fall off, leaving clean tape going onto the takeup reel and totally destroying the master tape.
Fortunately, the engineer was clueful enough to NOT stop the recording (which would have left them with neither a disk nor a master tape). Result: A new, clean, ultra-high-fidelity, master disk of the entire historic album, about as faithful a copy of what was on the master tape as it's possible to make.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Your confidence is proof of your inexperience. Data... dies. Sorry, that's just the truth.
If you've ever tried to do a data recovery on years-old data, whether it's audio tape, film, HDD, flash, CD/DVD rips, whatever. They all have an error rate that increases over time.
The only way to preserve data long term is to actively manage it. Keep redundant copies. Use error correcting code to identify data errors and correct them. Media must be periodically re-read and written to ensure "freshness". Non-digital data must be redundantly copied in line with its utility, analog data should be digitized to minimize generation loss.
We maintain a large ZFS file store. We scrub everything weekly, a process that does all the above to proactively identify small data errors and fix them before they become big, unrecoverable ones. We store all our data in redundant storage pools, and replicate constantly.
This, or a process like this, is what's required to keep data squeaky clean, secure, and accurate.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I have some audio tapes that are 50 years old and still play. I have a couple of tube decks that I acquired so I can digitize them.
I read about the Finial laser turntable in '88, and by the time the new owner of the technology finally got them to market in the late '90's, I had gone CD and didn't care. But, I still have the LPs stored vertically, still have a turntable, and maybe one of these days I'll eBay an ELP laser turntable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Luke, help me take this mask off
I can't tell you how many times my backup tapes come back from cold storage unreadable....
Sola Scriptura Sola Fide Sola Gratia Sola Christus
Couldn't they read the tapes using a frikkin' laser and the Faraday Effect?
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.