Formats like this sort of reenforce Steve Albini's claim that he only records to tape because he's more certain people will be able to play it back hundreds of years from now than any other (digital) format. The tech is super simple and requires no proprietary anything. He believes that even the most open digital formats will become obscure and forgotten eventually and no one will really be able to playback lots of music that was only recorded that way.
> Formats like this sort of reenforce Steve Albini's claim that he only records to tape because he's more certain people will be able to play it back hundreds of years from now
This article seems like a pretty strong argument in the opposite direction: about a tape format which is effectively unreadable without significant heroics (to the extent that a documentary was made about trying to play one of these tapes.)
The format admittedly wasn't exactly successful, and I imagine more common formats would have better luck finding usable hardware. But even then, the tape still degrades.
If I really needed something to last a Very Long Time, I'd print it in highly redundant QR codes on lots of paper, and then also print the specs for QR codes and whatever other encodings were necessary.
> He believes that even the most open digital formats will become obscure and forgotten eventually and no one will really be able to playback lots of music that was only recorded that way.
Oh please. Just use raw PCM audio. No one will ever lose track of how to play that.
A 10.5 inch reel of 2 inch tape can be digitized just fine to 16 bit samples, 44/48kHz, 24 channels, most of an hour. That's about 7 gigabytes. So you could back up a huge number of digitized tapes to a dozen different locations quite easily. You could put a thousand of them on a pocket SSD.
I doubt it. There’s a better chance we don’t even use modern computer architecture and everything about todays computers appear archaic and that all the knowledge is lost. And tons of stuff is left behind.
If you can see the bits, you can figure out raw PCM. It's super trivial.
If we're worried about being unable to access the bits at all, we should consider etching them into metal or printing them on archival paper. Tape won't reliably last hundreds of years. But for now we can keep bits alive pretty easily, with low but nonzero sustained effort.
If you have a lot of tapes, a dozen digital copies will survive a lot more incidents than the originals, and be a lot cheaper than analog backups along with no generation loss.
We should start thinking more seriously about long-term preservation of digital data in general, and I think that one thing that would help a lot is to design our storage (not transmission) formats to include a detailed human-readable description of the format in its headers. Basically just a blob of text, not compressed in any way, something that would be immediately visible and parseable if you inspect the raw data. Depending on how detailed the spec is, this would be an overhead on the order of tens of kilobytes to a few megabytes - for storage, this is negligible, while the long-term benefits are clear.
