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Frankie99 wrote: Fri Aug 30, 2024 9:02 am That's the point. A consumer based niche technology that wasn't able to mature with the rest of its cousins. Digital formats have zillions of examples of consumer based niche file types that have followed that same path and are now lost to time and the progress of machines.

People didn't lose their Super 8 reels because it's a dead format. They lost them because time passes and people lose shit all the time.

But I don't think that's been the case with file formats. How many niche consumer file types of any note really have been lost to time?

I ask because I deal with niche file formats a lot, and times have never been better for people who like niche file formats. You want to read and write 3" disk format for Amstrad CPC range of British home computers from the mid 1980s? Sure you do, and why not. That is not a problem. How about the sample files used by the Ensoniq Mirage sampling keyboard? My one died so forget that, but I got the files anyway. How about a Vectrex? The Vectrex is cool; the only home console to have a built-in vector monitor, came out in 1982, all over by 1983. I have a Vectrex. I got it with a microSD card reader so you can play Vectrex games off the card reader. Or write your own, maybe one day? (The Vectrex is cool.)

I've got loads of old electronic junk and one of the privileges of the time we live in is just how trivial it is to transfer data to and from all of them, encode and decode it. I've even got a card reader for my Sega Master System now and it cost me all of 15 bucks.

In the future it's only going to be easier as you could conceivably just take a bunch of raw digital data that you didn't even know what it WAS, throw it at an AI and it would have a good shot at discovering whatever text, image, audio or video media was buried in there. I don't naturally think about using computers like that, but future generations will.

But also, those of us who are at least as old as me, which is to say most all a'youse cunts, have lived through the very birth of the home computer revolution. A remarkable time, full of weird and wonderful short-lived consumer devices, many of them extremely regional - like the Welsh home computer (Salut! Dragon 32). A privileged time to see, a time of rapid change. And it has left us I think with a general impression of digital technology being always in a state of flux.

But it actually trends towards standardisation pretty rapidly. ASCII is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year, and although it was superseded by Unicode (back in 1991), it's still with us today. The .wav file also dates back to 1991. Next year is the 30th birthday of USB. 30 years we've been trying to stick them little thumb drives into the rectangular hole the wrong way up.

Now we've got USB-C but USB-A can still be plugged in today (after three goes). FAT32 has been around since Windows 95.

When it comes to "I Do Not Trust The Capitalists..."?

Think about Nightbreed.

The footage never went anywhere. An executive just said it didn't warrant messing with.

The "The Cabal Cut' version of that film happened because some VHS of what had been cut still was out there.

When Shout! Factory stepped in to talk to Morgan's Creek about the possibility of a director's cut?

Even Barker could not believe the footage was till around somewhere.

So, yeah.

Tape does not exactly seem like garlic and a cross that one can shove into the face of capitalists.

Anthony Flack wrote: Mon Sep 02, 2024 6:06 pm
People didn't lose their Super 8 reels because it's a dead format.
(The Vectrex is cool.)

They lost their Super 8 the same way we all did. The celluloid got so brittle that he film snapped wvery time you loaded a reel on a projector. The only way to confidently store old film stock is to digitize it so something will exist in the future. The only version of anything super old on film we have to watch is because of Telecine. Without it...

One of my regurts is selling my Vectrex before moving out of Chicago. I had room in the van... who was I trying to impress? So cool.

Kniferide wrote: They lost their Super 8 the same way we all did. The celluloid got so brittle that he film snapped wvery time you loaded a reel on a projector. The only way to confidently store old film stock is to digitize it so something will exist in the future. The only version of anything super old on film we have to watch is because of Telecine. Without it...

I have definitely had experience with brittle films (8 & 16mm), but I have lots of regular-8mm (from 1940s) that plays back fine.
Also Super-8 reels from 1970s and after.

I think it's a pretty good example of the "do nothing" path to longevity. A dry shoebox can pretty much do the trick.
You wouldn't see the motion (of course) but you could at least begin decoding it using only your eyes and a light source.

A lot of the films I have are personal films that were shot by people unknown to me, so I guess those films have been lost, in the sense that they're no longer available to the people who might presumably have the most interest or need to view them. But the film stock didn't crumble.

Teacher's Pet wrote: Tue Sep 03, 2024 12:04 pm

Kniferide wrote: They lost their Super 8 the same way we all did. The celluloid got so brittle that he film snapped wvery time you loaded a reel on a projector. The only way to confidently store old film stock is to digitize it so something will exist in the future. The only version of anything super old on film we have to watch is because of Telecine. Without it...

I have definitely had experience with brittle films (8 & 16mm), but I have lots of regular-8mm (from 1940s) that plays back fine.
Also Super-8 reels from 1970s and after.

I think it's a pretty good example of the "do nothing" path to longevity. A dry shoebox can pretty much do the trick.
You wouldn't see the motion (of course) but you could at least begin decoding it using only your eyes and a light source.

A lot of the films I have are personal films that were shot by people unknown to me, so I guess those films have been lost, in the sense that they're no longer available to the people who might presumably have the most interest or need to view them. But the film stock didn't crumble.

The state of the projector definitely goes a long way in helping with that too. When I worked at the cultural center and we did little film fests of old Library films our huge 16mm would snap shit all the time. Old film... old machine... unskilled labor. Not a good combo.

My argument is being met with minutia and tangents as the counter arguments, so I don't think it's contributing anymore. Whether tech can be resurrected isn't a counter to my argument.

Frankie99 wrote: Tue Sep 03, 2024 6:01 pm My argument is being met with minutia and tangents as the counter arguments, so I don't think it's contributing anymore. Whether tech can be resurrected isn't a counter to my argument.

Sorry If I derailed, I wasn't arguing with you... I don't think.

Not meant to level that at anyone in particular, I think my super 8 analogy failed, and I should have used a better one.

Kniferide wrote: Thu Aug 29, 2024 4:52 pm Having a single physical copy of a thing is having nothing for the purposes of archive. There is nothing "archival" about analog tape unless you have multiple copies of it. 1 is none, 2 is one. In digital land 1 is 1,000,000,000... if you want it to be and with very little effort/comparative costs.

love analog tape and wish it was feasible for me to use it daily but it just isn't. If I did, I would absolutely bounce out everything to digital files for backup.

I have many single copies of 4 track tapes that I recorded on a whim in 1992-8 that are just sitting on cassettes in a file cabinet in my house. You can come over and listen to them. The information is available. A lot of it isn't very good music, but it's right there to listen to .

One can make multiple copies of analog tapes, of course. But the process of creating and managing multiple copies of a master recording is separate from the initial fact of the master recording. Again - analog gives you two physical masters. Digital does not.

I do not get how there is an argument about that. I can only repeat myself about physical, standardized, non-proprietary storage of information that, even in the event of failure, will still likely yield some considerable percentage of the information.

Anthony Flack wrote: Thu Aug 29, 2024 5:15 pm Text is digital; you can reproduce it as much as you like. As I mentioned, The Iliad, The Republic and Euclid's Elements have stuck around to this day. Nice.

Text on a computer is digital. Text in a book is analog. Digital does not mean reproduce-ability; I have two 1/4" machines and can make copies all day of tapes.

Anthony Flack wrote: Thu Aug 29, 2024 5:15 pm

Now if you recorded your multitrack recording with files that have exactly the same start time, no plugins, no overdubs/edits, into .wav files all in the same folder with clear labels (or you always always burn stems that do exactly this), then your may have created a session that some future DAW or whatever takes its place can reconstruct

Hang on, it's not a case of if you do all of that you MIGHT be ok. If you do all of that you will have definitely created something that ALL future DAWs would be able to reconstruct perfectly with no effort whatsoever. You won't do all of that, but there's a pretty severe double standard being applied here. You don't get any information about the mix or outboard effects on your tape, but that's ok because the "workflow" means you write it all down and of course you don't lose it and of course you have access to all of those outboard effects in the future. But if a plugin isn't present, never mind that the workflow includes automatically writing human-readable files that tell you exactly what they all are and the worst case scenario is that you have to use a different effect. Meanwhile assuming the digital "workflow" dictates we all become Skrillex and the edit will be really complicated and raw takes will be useless.

I followed this point by describing how extremely rare this is. Almost nobody does it. They finish their record, they mix it down to a 2 track file, and it's all usually some level of a disorganized mess that requires having the original DAW & OS & plugins to be able to reconstruct the multitrack in the future. Because making a record is expensive and hard and time consuming and alien to most folks. When they're done with it, they want to have and share the music, not go through (or pay someone to go through) file-cleanup.

I have continued to follow this thread and it just gets more and more strange. Why search for illuminating comparisons in film or text or what have you? The best evidence we have is the lived reality of thousands and thousands of musical projects. There's no need to construct an analogy. Analog tape is a robust and pretty straightforward technology and it has proven itself well as a solid method to store what's been recorded immediately after the session is done with no work beyond labeling stuff. (And even then, one can figure out pretty well what's on an orphaned reel.)

Digital recording does not offer a physical master, is proprietary to various degrees, is usually fucked entirely if there's an error, and requires time and diligence to approach the level of future accessibility of a reel of tape. Yes, you can pretty easily make lots of copies of digital sessions and spread them to the wind. I'll repeat myself - in my experience, ubiquity does not equal future-proofing. It often means multiple copies of different versions floating around or archival spots that become inaccessible in the future. It frequently results in uncertainty (which one is the FINAL version? Who has the password to the band's old Dropbox account?) While this can be avoided with real attention and diligence, most people simply don't do it.

And I'm not going to enter into any discussion here about "AI is probably gonna solve it for us anyway" because that has gotta be the laziest thing one can say on the matter.

To mistake copy-ability with permanence puts the longevity of the majority of music being made today in real danger. I honestly think this is a real tragedy. One of the real contributions that this studio/forum broadly and Alibini in particular offered is a counter-trend insistence that we do not need to treat so much music as ephemeral, unimportant, replaceable. This is a weird and seemingly backwards idea when one first hears it - that we should persist with a proven approach when Garage Band is so easy to use. But the argument absolutely holds up upon scrutiny. Despite the more common use of WAV file formats and cheap storage, nothing takes away from the core point made on the RADAR 24 thread nearly 20 years ago: music, especially non-obvious oddball music, is worth preserving and the best way to do that is to commit at least one version of it to professional analog tape.

= Justin