Music industry’s 1990s hard drives, like all HDDs, are dying (libranet.de)

submitted 2 months ago by petrescatraian@libranet.de to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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Seems like someone needs to pirate their content back.

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[-] cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 43 points 2 months ago

The music can be copied to new hard drives without any loss in quality, so why are they leaving their only copy on 30 year old hard drives?

[-] deegeese@sopuli.xyz 38 points 2 months ago

Just following longstanding studio practice of putting the masters in a vault so you can forget about them.

They’re not used to the risks of bit rot.

[-] sxan@midwest.social 12 points 2 months ago

A studio should be able to afford a good LTO tape drive for at least one backup copy; LTO tapes last over 30 years and suffer less from random bitrot than spinning disks. Just pay someone to spend a month duplicating the entire archive every couple of decades. And every decade you can also consolidate a bunch of tapes since the capacity has kept increasing; 18TB tapes are now available: $/MB it's always far cheaper to use tape.

They could have done that with the drives, but today you'd have to go find an ATA IDE or old SCSI card (of you're lucky) that'll work on a modern motherboard.

But I'd guess their problem is more not having a process for maintaining the archives than the technology. Duplicating and consolidating hard drives once a year would have been relatively cheap, and as long as they verified checksums and kept duplicates, HDs would have been fine too.

[-] deegeese@sopuli.xyz 5 points 2 months ago

Easy work for a digital archivist.

Music studios didn’t have those in the 1990’s.

[-] sxan@midwest.social 2 points 2 months ago

I agree; it probably didn't occur to them. But it was a fairly common job in IT in the 90's. Not a career or job description, maybe, but a duty you got saddled with.

[-] XTL@sopuli.xyz 2 points 2 months ago

Why did the reuse old master tapes?

Money. Or the perception that there isn't money to be gained from the replication and maintenance of the archives.

[-] Blackout@fedia.io 38 points 2 months ago

Some dude out there, smoking a bong right now, has a Flac of everything ever made. Piracy will save history

[-] entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org 25 points 2 months ago

He doesn't have the original Pro Tools 0.8 sessions with the raw takes, plugin settings, etc.

That's the level of potential preservation we're missing out on here. Not just the final product, not just the stems, but the full original raw takes and the mixes that made those takes into the original final products.