That SSDs go read-only as they wear down is a myth. I've never seen a single credible report of it happening. If you read real wear-down tests, what actually happens is that the drives stop retaining data when powered off as they get very old. Not a single drive tested there failed gracefully at the end.
Old age can cause controller failures, usually due to the capacitors wearing out. That's becoming increasingly common now that better SSDs are adding larger "supercaps" and similar battery mechanisms, for clean shutdown when power drops.
I've never seen or heard a credible report of a SSD that has a well implemented read-only mode when it starts to fail. What actually happens when you look at endurance experiments is that the drives stop retaining data for very long when they wear down. Wear out the sectors enough, power off the machine, and the data will be gone by the next day. No manufacturer handles it as gracefully as a solid read-only mode would be yet.
You might not agree with their methodology, but I did provide a reference for my claim. You should try it some time. Betting on a hunch is not a path to successful argument.
Re:Oracle will have the patch when they buy MariaD
on
A Tale of Two MySQL Bugs
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Yup, MariaDB is playing the same copyright assignment tricks that Monty used before, so that he could leverage community work yet still sell MySQL as a business. No reason to believe he's doing anything different this time. When the FSF asks for copyright assignment, that's acceptable because they have never breached the trust of their contributors. But when Monty does it, you have to assume he's setting things up so he can cash out again.
I don't think it's possible for MySQL to get the "C" part in ACID right without a total rewrite, which seems unlikely under Oracle's watch. There used to be all sorts of trivial ways you could insert garbage data into MySQL, things like February 31 being a valid date or numbers going into boolean fields. They added this strict mode as a way to add validation for most of that. But strict is a client setting. All it takes is one client that ignores this, and the engine will still let you put garbage into there--values that are not going to be valid if you later work on them using a strict setting client. If you can put data in one end of that's not correct when read by another client, that's the exact opposite of a "consistent" database. It boggles my mind that anyone finds this acceptable. I guess people who do all their validation on the client are fine with it maybe? I can't explain how people who don't understand databases at all make their decisions.
I don't follow MySQL closely enough to know if they're still silently truncating data sometimes too, but that's been a nagging problem over the years too. Strong validation of data is like security: you don't just bolt it on later. It's something that needs to be enforced in as many places as possible in the code, if you want any hope of getting it right and bug free. If you actually want data to be validated in all situations, you need to use something like PostgreSQL instead. There even new types you add to the database can execute any check constraint function you want before that data is allowed in, period. That overhead contributes to why MySQL is faster on trivial things, but sometimes you get what you pay for.
[Citation Needed]. Among industry watchers the two most popular RDBMS systems are considered to be Oracle and Microsoft's SQL Server. MySQL is in the same ballpark, but it certainly doesn't have a large lead. Here's one survey showing that via a few metrics they combine. You'll get the same sort of ranking if you dig into most market surveys.
Not sure which is funnier; the idea that MySQL is a "rock solid databases" or that Oracle cares about validating its optimizer. I'll just point you at Top 10 Optimizer Regression Bugs in MySQL 5.6 and wander off now.
That 24/192 recordings have a higher tolerance for capturing full fidelity even in the face of mastering mistakes is not an opinion. And that was only one of the two reasons I gave for why higher resolution recordings might deliver better sound to the consumers buying them. It's hard to ABX things that are altering how an analog tape is digitized. You need some master tape and an analog ABX box to do that, and the insertion loss of the comparison device impacts the results. I'm happy to accept a computer switching ABX setup as perfectly transparent, but that can't be used to compare analog vs. digital.
You just recommended a video where the person presenting doesn't even understand sampling theory, instead spouting the old "there's space between the digital samples" nonsense as if that matters once filtering is applied. I'm laughing my ass off as you accuse me of falling for BS while sharing that technical disaster.
Good try, but no. Audio on Laserdiscs could be stored in both analog and digital forms, and the digital forms used EFM encoding just like CDs do. Digital audio bit rot on Laserdisc was a subset of the larger laser rot problem, which could hit the format's analog or digital chunks. Bit rot similar to the way CD-R media is corrupted by sunlight became more common near the end of the LD format's lifespan, as higher bitrate digital surround encoding (Dolby Digital and DTS) was used heavily.
What goes into the header of a.wav file is pretty arbitrary, there isn't a strong spec for that section. But as you discovered yourself, the workaround--just throwing the header out and treating it as PCM data--will fix almost every issue, and that knowledge isn't obscure (yet). While annoying, something that is more or less straight PCM has the advantage that you really don't need any additional software to decode it. FLAC is great, but it assumes you'll always be able to build the FLAC software on future systems. That's not a bad bet, but it's not a sure thing like being able to read raw PCM data.
Did you miss the part in my little story where I was sad to see all the people in the industry couldn't tell the difference? I find it pretty funny that you're sure recording to tape sounds better first, while rejecting the idea that high res audio matters. If you read a study showing that recording to tape initially was inaudible vs. direct to digital in an ABX test, would you still believe yourself here? The mainstream "it has to be measurable via this test to exist" crowd has a long history of losing to audiophiles. Transistors with flat frequency response but poor harmonic distortion, speakers with flat response but bad impulse handling, and digital with poor clock jitter are all things listeners complained about before they were explained in test results. An ABX test can't prove something is inaudible; it only proves it doesn't seem audible the way the test is setup right now.
That most people don't listen very well, regardless of their career or the skills they claim, is endlessly documented. I can't find the study right now, but I even recall one where it was shown that most people couldn't tell 16 bit digital audio from 15 or 14 bits. I think they tested down to 12 and some people still didn't notice.
This whole area has been beaten up pretty well by 24/192 Music Downloads...and why they make no sense. The problem with that whole article is that it presumes perfect equipment, dithering, and recording practice. What 30 years of crappy sounding CDs have shown us is that none of those things consistently happen, because record companies spew out whatever half-assed reissue garbage they think they can get away with. Perfectly made CD audio sounds excellent, but there are so many examples of less than perfectly made ones.
I suspect that the main reason 24/192 recordings sound better is that it assures a baseline high quality of equipment was used, and there's a very large margin for error while still capturing everything. All sorts of mistakes are absorbed by the medium. Also, asking for a 24/192 recording states a preference--that the consumer wants the audio without the excessive compression or other processing. Trent Reznor was just in the news for offering regular and "audiophile" versions of his new record; that's the same sort of distinction people asking for 24/192 recordings are saying they prefer over the mainstream CD quality version.
The Session File format is unique to the program though, so you might not be able to reproduce some aspects of your mixed version unless you do an explicit "bounce to disk" for every project element.
There are over a billion devices in the world capable of playing CDs, and even ten years ago there were already more than 70M DVD players. No floppy drive or tape based player has ever gotten even close to that installed base. That's why these formats will still be around in 50 years.
The reason he didn't profit massively from the success of "In Utero" is that he didn't tap into the royalties on the record, which seems a strong part of his philosophy. If you're going to assign some sort of money based bias to the man, the fact that he runs a craft worker style to his studio--charging based on his work, not on the artist's resulting success--could just as easily be a sign of good morals and integrity here.
The argument that analog tape has a proven longevity beyond what's been observed so far for digital media is a simple statement of fact. You can agree with that or feel it's such an obsolete observation that it's irrelevant. But whether the person making the statement has a vested interest in analog tape is not the primary way I think it should be evaluated. There is a clear argument to be made here regardless of whether he has some investment based bias or not.
I have CDs from the 80's and CD-R media from the mid 90's that won't play, along with plenty of bit-rot laserdiscs. I meant that comment toward player availability rather than media lifespan. I'm only confident that 50 years from now I'll be able to find a CD player around, not that all CDs made now will still play on it.
The Bob Stuart paper that influenced the DVD-Audio standard hit interesting numbers starting from the ear. I don't think Bob left quite enough margin for error in the equipment needing to be significantly better than what you hear to be transparent though, which is how we got from his 20 bit/58KHz suggestion to need 24/192.
8-track players are easy to find. I have two in my basement, and I was just laughing at one in a 7-11 store last night. The biggest problem with 8-tracks is that the tapes are very fragile. A few parts in the mechanism don't last very long. Maybe 10% of the tapes I try will still play for me.
I can credibly claim to be in the "golden ear" crowd as a former high-end audio reviewer. You need functional ears, but that's more about training than anything else. The better reviewers have spent years of their life carefully listening to different equipment and music, trying to become good at hearing small differences.
There are a few small tricks people usually fall for that good listeners try to get a handle on:
Louder is better. This one is very hard to isolate out; if you're not using tools like a voltmeter sometimes to match levels, you're being fooled by it.
More compressed is better.
Boosted bass and treble is better.
Familiar is better.
The last one is the most insidious, and I have an anecdote on how deep that goes. When 24/96K digital was first being released for studio use, I sat through a single-blind demo room at an AES show. They played an excellent analog master jazz recording, a version sampled at 24/96, and a version at 16/44.1 CD resolution downsampled via their equipment. I correctly graded the three from better to worse, seemed pretty obvious to me even though the high res digital was very close to the original.
As the presenter worked the room asking people which of his samples A, B, and C were, it was obvious mine was not the majority opinion. There were a few vocal people expressing their opinion that got things completely backwards. They thought the CD quality version was the "best", and therefore it had to be the original master. As this was an AES show, these were people who worked with audio all day, and their preference didn't match reality as I heard it at all.
Listening to their (incorrect) arguments for why they made their decisions, I realized they liked CD quality and its limitations. There was some compression to the CD version and a bit of a fuzzy/harsh roll off at the top end. But it was what they were used to. They thought recordings were supposed to sound that way, because most recordings they listened to did. You can see "familiar is better" in every generation of listener. People who grew up on vinyl like surface noise, early CD listeners are used to terrible aliasing filters, and people who grew up with low rate MP3s like their artifacts. And on the studio side, there are people who like the way analog tape sounds. To be fair, that was better than any digital available until very recently. Recent remasters of old analog recordings are still digging out details you couldn't hear in the earlier digital transfers. I think current generation 192/24 bit digital equipment is more than good enough to replace analog tape though; we passed that point a few years ago.
You really should RTFA before constructing your strawman. "Albini records to analog tape, not because he's in love with the sound of analog. No, he's concerned that as digital formats continue to evolve, today's digital recordings will be unplayable in the future".
Analog master tapes normally have extensive printed notes on their label, about things like the speed used and which tracks are in what location. Digital files need similar documentation on things like format used. Studio masters being made by the musician shouldn't have any DRM silliness to deal with.
The main challenge for digital audio preservation is that all audio tracks need to be exported into simple PCM files. I would agree that some common studio digital formats will not be readable in the future. That means the musicians need to get.wav files instead of things like ProTools files. But saying properly exported and documented digital is fragile compared to analog tape is ridiculous. I expect to be able to read PCM files saved onto current CD and DVD media for at least another 50 years, while it's already hard to get good quality tape playback.
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That SSDs go read-only as they wear down is a myth. I've never seen a single credible report of it happening. If you read real wear-down tests, what actually happens is that the drives stop retaining data when powered off as they get very old. Not a single drive tested there failed gracefully at the end.
Old age can cause controller failures, usually due to the capacitors wearing out. That's becoming increasingly common now that better SSDs are adding larger "supercaps" and similar battery mechanisms, for clean shutdown when power drops.
I've never seen or heard a credible report of a SSD that has a well implemented read-only mode when it starts to fail. What actually happens when you look at endurance experiments is that the drives stop retaining data for very long when they wear down. Wear out the sectors enough, power off the machine, and the data will be gone by the next day. No manufacturer handles it as gracefully as a solid read-only mode would be yet.
You might not agree with their methodology, but I did provide a reference for my claim. You should try it some time. Betting on a hunch is not a path to successful argument.
Yup, MariaDB is playing the same copyright assignment tricks that Monty used before, so that he could leverage community work yet still sell MySQL as a business. No reason to believe he's doing anything different this time. When the FSF asks for copyright assignment, that's acceptable because they have never breached the trust of their contributors. But when Monty does it, you have to assume he's setting things up so he can cash out again.
Shanking with a rusty spoon? No, now the correct way to describe unfairness on Oracle's side is that you're adding weight to a kingpost.
I don't think it's possible for MySQL to get the "C" part in ACID right without a total rewrite, which seems unlikely under Oracle's watch. There used to be all sorts of trivial ways you could insert garbage data into MySQL, things like February 31 being a valid date or numbers going into boolean fields. They added this strict mode as a way to add validation for most of that. But strict is a client setting. All it takes is one client that ignores this, and the engine will still let you put garbage into there--values that are not going to be valid if you later work on them using a strict setting client. If you can put data in one end of that's not correct when read by another client, that's the exact opposite of a "consistent" database. It boggles my mind that anyone finds this acceptable. I guess people who do all their validation on the client are fine with it maybe? I can't explain how people who don't understand databases at all make their decisions.
I don't follow MySQL closely enough to know if they're still silently truncating data sometimes too, but that's been a nagging problem over the years too. Strong validation of data is like security: you don't just bolt it on later. It's something that needs to be enforced in as many places as possible in the code, if you want any hope of getting it right and bug free. If you actually want data to be validated in all situations, you need to use something like PostgreSQL instead. There even new types you add to the database can execute any check constraint function you want before that data is allowed in, period. That overhead contributes to why MySQL is faster on trivial things, but sometimes you get what you pay for.
[Citation Needed]. Among industry watchers the two most popular RDBMS systems are considered to be Oracle and Microsoft's SQL Server. MySQL is in the same ballpark, but it certainly doesn't have a large lead. Here's one survey showing that via a few metrics they combine. You'll get the same sort of ranking if you dig into most market surveys.
Not sure which is funnier; the idea that MySQL is a "rock solid databases" or that Oracle cares about validating its optimizer. I'll just point you at Top 10 Optimizer Regression Bugs in MySQL 5.6 and wander off now.
That 24/192 recordings have a higher tolerance for capturing full fidelity even in the face of mastering mistakes is not an opinion. And that was only one of the two reasons I gave for why higher resolution recordings might deliver better sound to the consumers buying them. It's hard to ABX things that are altering how an analog tape is digitized. You need some master tape and an analog ABX box to do that, and the insertion loss of the comparison device impacts the results. I'm happy to accept a computer switching ABX setup as perfectly transparent, but that can't be used to compare analog vs. digital.
You just recommended a video where the person presenting doesn't even understand sampling theory, instead spouting the old "there's space between the digital samples" nonsense as if that matters once filtering is applied. I'm laughing my ass off as you accuse me of falling for BS while sharing that technical disaster.
Good try, but no. Audio on Laserdiscs could be stored in both analog and digital forms, and the digital forms used EFM encoding just like CDs do. Digital audio bit rot on Laserdisc was a subset of the larger laser rot problem, which could hit the format's analog or digital chunks. Bit rot similar to the way CD-R media is corrupted by sunlight became more common near the end of the LD format's lifespan, as higher bitrate digital surround encoding (Dolby Digital and DTS) was used heavily.
What goes into the header of a .wav file is pretty arbitrary, there isn't a strong spec for that section. But as you discovered yourself, the workaround--just throwing the header out and treating it as PCM data--will fix almost every issue, and that knowledge isn't obscure (yet). While annoying, something that is more or less straight PCM has the advantage that you really don't need any additional software to decode it. FLAC is great, but it assumes you'll always be able to build the FLAC software on future systems. That's not a bad bet, but it's not a sure thing like being able to read raw PCM data.
Did you miss the part in my little story where I was sad to see all the people in the industry couldn't tell the difference? I find it pretty funny that you're sure recording to tape sounds better first, while rejecting the idea that high res audio matters. If you read a study showing that recording to tape initially was inaudible vs. direct to digital in an ABX test, would you still believe yourself here? The mainstream "it has to be measurable via this test to exist" crowd has a long history of losing to audiophiles. Transistors with flat frequency response but poor harmonic distortion, speakers with flat response but bad impulse handling, and digital with poor clock jitter are all things listeners complained about before they were explained in test results. An ABX test can't prove something is inaudible; it only proves it doesn't seem audible the way the test is setup right now.
That most people don't listen very well, regardless of their career or the skills they claim, is endlessly documented. I can't find the study right now, but I even recall one where it was shown that most people couldn't tell 16 bit digital audio from 15 or 14 bits. I think they tested down to 12 and some people still didn't notice.
This whole area has been beaten up pretty well by 24/192 Music Downloads...and why they make no sense. The problem with that whole article is that it presumes perfect equipment, dithering, and recording practice. What 30 years of crappy sounding CDs have shown us is that none of those things consistently happen, because record companies spew out whatever half-assed reissue garbage they think they can get away with. Perfectly made CD audio sounds excellent, but there are so many examples of less than perfectly made ones.
I suspect that the main reason 24/192 recordings sound better is that it assures a baseline high quality of equipment was used, and there's a very large margin for error while still capturing everything. All sorts of mistakes are absorbed by the medium. Also, asking for a 24/192 recording states a preference--that the consumer wants the audio without the excessive compression or other processing. Trent Reznor was just in the news for offering regular and "audiophile" versions of his new record; that's the same sort of distinction people asking for 24/192 recordings are saying they prefer over the mainstream CD quality version.
The Session File format is unique to the program though, so you might not be able to reproduce some aspects of your mixed version unless you do an explicit "bounce to disk" for every project element.
There are over a billion devices in the world capable of playing CDs, and even ten years ago there were already more than 70M DVD players. No floppy drive or tape based player has ever gotten even close to that installed base. That's why these formats will still be around in 50 years.
The reason he didn't profit massively from the success of "In Utero" is that he didn't tap into the royalties on the record, which seems a strong part of his philosophy. If you're going to assign some sort of money based bias to the man, the fact that he runs a craft worker style to his studio--charging based on his work, not on the artist's resulting success--could just as easily be a sign of good morals and integrity here.
The argument that analog tape has a proven longevity beyond what's been observed so far for digital media is a simple statement of fact. You can agree with that or feel it's such an obsolete observation that it's irrelevant. But whether the person making the statement has a vested interest in analog tape is not the primary way I think it should be evaluated. There is a clear argument to be made here regardless of whether he has some investment based bias or not.
I have CDs from the 80's and CD-R media from the mid 90's that won't play, along with plenty of bit-rot laserdiscs. I meant that comment toward player availability rather than media lifespan. I'm only confident that 50 years from now I'll be able to find a CD player around, not that all CDs made now will still play on it.
The Bob Stuart paper that influenced the DVD-Audio standard hit interesting numbers starting from the ear. I don't think Bob left quite enough margin for error in the equipment needing to be significantly better than what you hear to be transparent though, which is how we got from his 20 bit/58KHz suggestion to need 24/192.
I'm glad to see you're worrying about how fan films might devastate our digital archives.
8-track players are easy to find. I have two in my basement, and I was just laughing at one in a 7-11 store last night. The biggest problem with 8-tracks is that the tapes are very fragile. A few parts in the mechanism don't last very long. Maybe 10% of the tapes I try will still play for me.
Of course FLAC handles 24/192. So does ALAC. Here's a sample record available in all of those formats. hdtracks is a good source for these too.
I can credibly claim to be in the "golden ear" crowd as a former high-end audio reviewer. You need functional ears, but that's more about training than anything else. The better reviewers have spent years of their life carefully listening to different equipment and music, trying to become good at hearing small differences.
There are a few small tricks people usually fall for that good listeners try to get a handle on:
The last one is the most insidious, and I have an anecdote on how deep that goes. When 24/96K digital was first being released for studio use, I sat through a single-blind demo room at an AES show. They played an excellent analog master jazz recording, a version sampled at 24/96, and a version at 16/44.1 CD resolution downsampled via their equipment. I correctly graded the three from better to worse, seemed pretty obvious to me even though the high res digital was very close to the original.
As the presenter worked the room asking people which of his samples A, B, and C were, it was obvious mine was not the majority opinion. There were a few vocal people expressing their opinion that got things completely backwards. They thought the CD quality version was the "best", and therefore it had to be the original master. As this was an AES show, these were people who worked with audio all day, and their preference didn't match reality as I heard it at all.
Listening to their (incorrect) arguments for why they made their decisions, I realized they liked CD quality and its limitations. There was some compression to the CD version and a bit of a fuzzy/harsh roll off at the top end. But it was what they were used to. They thought recordings were supposed to sound that way, because most recordings they listened to did. You can see "familiar is better" in every generation of listener. People who grew up on vinyl like surface noise, early CD listeners are used to terrible aliasing filters, and people who grew up with low rate MP3s like their artifacts. And on the studio side, there are people who like the way analog tape sounds. To be fair, that was better than any digital available until very recently. Recent remasters of old analog recordings are still digging out details you couldn't hear in the earlier digital transfers. I think current generation 192/24 bit digital equipment is more than good enough to replace analog tape though; we passed that point a few years ago.
That discussion is already going on in another thread here. This one, anchored with an incorrect "stranded investment" claim, is redundant.
You really should RTFA before constructing your strawman. "Albini records to analog tape, not because he's in love with the sound of analog. No, he's concerned that as digital formats continue to evolve, today's digital recordings will be unplayable in the future".
Anyone who recommends long term storage via analog tape is being incredibly irresponsible. We don't need another generation stuck with tape baking.
Analog master tapes normally have extensive printed notes on their label, about things like the speed used and which tracks are in what location. Digital files need similar documentation on things like format used. Studio masters being made by the musician shouldn't have any DRM silliness to deal with.
The main challenge for digital audio preservation is that all audio tracks need to be exported into simple PCM files. I would agree that some common studio digital formats will not be readable in the future. That means the musicians need to get .wav files instead of things like ProTools files. But saying properly exported and documented digital is fragile compared to analog tape is ridiculous. I expect to be able to read PCM files saved onto current CD and DVD media for at least another 50 years, while it's already hard to get good quality tape playback.