The Day the Music Burned • Hacker News Board

Re: The Day the Music Burned

#31

Post by xnyan » Tue, Jun 11, 2019, 2:47 PM UTC

mrbbk wrote: post #18

easymodex wrote: post #7

I'd actually say the biggest disaster in history of music is what.cd being shut down. They had the largest collection of hard to find music, meticulously curated and in lossless formats. I doubt there will ever be such a complete collection and it was devastating to see it get killed like that.

I normally don't bother posting replies to comments on here, but I have to point out that this is an unbelievably bizarre and wrongheaded interpretation of the scale and depth of this disaster. Curated collections of lossless streaming music are possible to recreate. Master tapes can NEVER BE RECREATED. Comparing the loss of a collection of reproducible fungible audio files with analog magnetic tape is misinformed at…

Was screaming really a need in this post? Despite what you wanted to communicate, that was my take away.

Re: The Day the Music Burned

#32

Post by bogomipz » Tue, Jun 11, 2019, 2:55 PM UTC

randomsearch wrote: post #25

mrbbk wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I normally don't bother posting replies to comments on here, but I have to point out that this is an unbelievably bizarre and wrongheaded interpretation of the scale and depth of this disaster. Curated collections of lossless streaming music are possible to recreate. Master tapes can NEVER BE RECREATED. Comparing the loss of a collection of reproducible fungible audio files with analog magnetic tape is misinformed at…

Steelmanning, if you’re certain you’re correct then you should assume the OP was misinformed, in which case why not kindly explain why without being aggressive? Educate us rather than attack us, please!

They did explain and so does the article:

From the article:

>'2. The Truest Capture It is sonic fidelity, first and foremost, that defines the importance of masters. “A master is the truest capture of a piece of recorded music,” said Adam Block, the former president of Legacy Recordings, Sony Music Entertainment’s catalog arm. “Sonically, masters can be stunning in their capturing of an event in time. Every copy thereafter is a sonic step away.”'

There is no recording with fidelity greater than the master tapes. It is the canonical "lossless" audio source. To state that the loss of a retail outlet that sold consumer products is somehow greater than the loss of 175K original audio recording from which all retail products were generated from is truly bizarre. I didn't take the OP's tone aggressive just one of astonishment.

Re: The Day the Music Burned

#33

Post by Dirlewanger » Tue, Jun 11, 2019, 3:00 PM UTC

randomsearch wrote: post #25

mrbbk wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I normally don't bother posting replies to comments on here, but I have to point out that this is an unbelievably bizarre and wrongheaded interpretation of the scale and depth of this disaster. Curated collections of lossless streaming music are possible to recreate. Master tapes can NEVER BE RECREATED. Comparing the loss of a collection of reproducible fungible audio files with analog magnetic tape is misinformed at…

Steelmanning, if you’re certain you’re correct then you should assume the OP was misinformed, in which case why not kindly explain why without being aggressive? Educate us rather than attack us, please!

Remember that what.cd only stored metadata files like .torrents/magnets/.cues/etc. I doubt very few, if any, of the rare releases there were actually lost; they're still out there somewhere in the Internet. What was lost was the platform and the community that allowed said rare music to be easily shared and propagated.

Re: The Day the Music Burned

#34

Post by xoa » Tue, Jun 11, 2019, 3:04 PM UTC

imtyler wrote: post #27

mrbbk wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I normally don't bother posting replies to comments on here, but I have to point out that this is an unbelievably bizarre and wrongheaded interpretation of the scale and depth of this disaster. Curated collections of lossless streaming music are possible to recreate. Master tapes can NEVER BE RECREATED. Comparing the loss of a collection of reproducible fungible audio files with analog magnetic tape is misinformed at…

I understand your point, but what good are master tapes if they're not available to be heard? I think you could argue that destroying a musical distribution network has the same effect as destroying music: it's no longer available to be consumed.

>I understand your point, but what good are master tapes if they're not available to be heard?

But they might be. The article itself gave examples of music long ignored that was rediscovered and became of interest, at which point the company could go to its archive and digitize the masters again with the latest tech. They did keep it archived in the first place for a reason after all. Alternatively with advancing tech and changing management the time may come when they'd be able to and decide to floor-perfectly digitize it all. Or down the road the public zeitgeist might change and support requiring the above.

Whether or not they were private, they at least represented potential, real and significant potential. Just like the Brazil museum that burned, or so many other sad losses. Having that potential destroyed forever can be rued even if it's not fully certain it'd be realized can't it?

Re: The Day the Music Burned

#35

Post by bogomipz » Tue, Jun 11, 2019, 3:04 PM UTC

imtyler wrote: post #27

mrbbk wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I normally don't bother posting replies to comments on here, but I have to point out that this is an unbelievably bizarre and wrongheaded interpretation of the scale and depth of this disaster. Curated collections of lossless streaming music are possible to recreate. Master tapes can NEVER BE RECREATED. Comparing the loss of a collection of reproducible fungible audio files with analog magnetic tape is misinformed at…

I understand your point, but what good are master tapes if they're not available to be heard? I think you could argue that destroying a musical distribution network has the same effect as destroying music: it's no longer available to be consumed.

>"I understand your point, but what good are master tapes if they're not available to be heard?"

Because they are they are the source for the products that music fans by. Remixes, re-issues, box sets and alternate takes all come from master tapes. Without the masters none of these things are possible. You are in fact "hearing" those master tapes just a copy of them. It's an incredibly privileged few who are able to sit and listen to the original 24 track 2 inch reels in a recording studio. VH1's show "Classic Albums" show often does with the artist and producer/engineer as the format of their TV show. It's worth watching for this aspect alone. There is a great example of why this is important in the article regarding the 50th Anniversary release of The Beatles's Sargent Peppers. These things would not be possible without the master tapes. The first generation of CDs in the 1980s are laughably bad fidelity. Now imagine the masters for many recording disappeared after those horrible fist early 1980s releases. Those terrible CD versions would be our source of everything going forward.

Re: The Day the Music Burned

#36

Post by mrbbk » Tue, Jun 11, 2019, 3:06 PM UTC

imtyler wrote: post #27

mrbbk wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I normally don't bother posting replies to comments on here, but I have to point out that this is an unbelievably bizarre and wrongheaded interpretation of the scale and depth of this disaster. Curated collections of lossless streaming music are possible to recreate. Master tapes can NEVER BE RECREATED. Comparing the loss of a collection of reproducible fungible audio files with analog magnetic tape is misinformed at…

I understand your point, but what good are master tapes if they're not available to be heard? I think you could argue that destroying a musical distribution network has the same effect as destroying music: it's no longer available to be consumed.

Mastertapes contain the music precisely as recorded by the artist themselves. They're not meant to be listened to or consumed actively -- they're there to serve as indelible recordings and references. Scholarly work on Jazz, for example, relies extensively on the existence of master tapes. Here's why:

When you record music to a multitrack magnetic tape like most of the recordings in this vault, you then get the ability during playback, for example, to fade individual tracks in and out. This would allow you to, e.g. isolate the sound of just McCoy Tyner's piano track on a classic Coltrane recording. Hearing his playing on it's own, without the rest of the band, could allow a music researcher to hear notes and sounds that might be masked by the final product recording, which flattens the recording.

One way of understanding this issue, which might appeal to the HN audience, is this: The process of "flattening" tracks to make the final sound recordings that we end up hearing as consumers is a lossy form of compression, even if the sound file format you consume it in is described as "lossless."

Re: The Day the Music Burned

#37

Post by tigeba » Tue, Jun 11, 2019, 3:06 PM UTC

50 years from now the problem will be that we have preserved digital masters in the form of session files for various DAWs and it will no longer be possible to patch together the correct hardware, OS, plugins, and virtual instruments to recreate the session. Artists and producers are encouraged to create stems or bounces of all the individual tracks for the purposes of long term preservation, but this does not always happen.

Re: The Day the Music Burned

#38

Post by laxentasken » Tue, Jun 11, 2019, 3:29 PM UTC

easymodex wrote: post #7

I'd actually say the biggest disaster in history of music is what.cd being shut down. They had the largest collection of hard to find music, meticulously curated and in lossless formats. I doubt there will ever be such a complete collection and it was devastating to see it get killed like that.

You're forgetting oink.

Re: The Day the Music Burned

#39

Post by gloflo » Tue, Jun 11, 2019, 3:47 PM UTC

ukyrgf wrote: post #28

daurnimator wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO the shutdown of Oink's pink palace was much worse than what.cd. What.cd was the bits of OiNK that people had bothered to archive...

This was true of Waffles. They were just torrent sites. People used them, musicians approved, leaks happened, and everything else that pirates do went down there. What.CD, however, became a place that was trying to build an archive of every piece of recorded music ever created. If a version of an album wasn't on there, a bounty was created that was often compelling enough that people would spend time and money huntin…

It was the same at OiNK's, at least for certain genres. Purely from the community itself.

Re: The Day the Music Burned

#40

Post by dehrmann » Tue, Jun 11, 2019, 3:57 PM UTC

sizzzzlerz wrote: post #8

Reading the list of jazz, soul, and rock artists whose material was lost just made me shudder. If an example of cultural devastation is ever needed, this is it. Jazz greats from the 40s and 50s. Popular music from the birth of rock and roll to the modern day. This is truly a tragedy. Why wasn't this material protected in, at least, a fireproof area, or, better, in some salt cave in the Utah desert?

To be blunt, there's a lot of it and it's not actually that valuable. We've had CDs for 30+ years. If there's an album UMG thought it'd be worth digitizing, remastering, and reselling, they'd have done it by now.

Humanity generates information (works of art included) faster than it can be reliably archived, and as that information ages and no one is interested in it, it becomes less relevant. Maybe it's a bit nihilistic, but I've come to accept humanity only has finite memory for a cultural canon, and things will drop out of it over time.