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The Day the Music Burned

nytimes.com

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Re: The Day the Music Burned

#41

Post by aaronarduino »

tigeba wrote: post #37

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…

This worries me greatly. I have worked in the music industry and most studios in my area only keep DAW sessions for about a year.

Sadly a lot of music is going to be lost in the next 50 years.

Re: The Day the Music Burned

#42

Post by iicc »

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.

It's the difference between not available now, and, destroyed for all eternity.

Re: The Day the Music Burned

#43

Post by iicc »

xoa wrote: post #34
imtyler wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 te…

>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.

For anyone interested check out the part-isolated "mogg" files from the Rockband games.

Re: The Day the Music Burned

#44

Post by RIMR »

Blame Capitalism.

If one company weren't hoarding master copies of these works of art for the purposes of profit, then the world would have lost nothing in that fire.

If music were owned by the people, we would never risk a single point of failure wiping out musical heritage.

Re: The Day the Music Burned

#45

Post by macandcheese »

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…

They weren't just torrent sites, they housed communities and (eventually on What) music graphs that led to countless new musical discoveries for users. If Oink wasn't shut down, What.cd wouldn't have existed - it was simply the precursor. Waffles was just (IMO) a slightly less popular destination for the diaspora of Oink users.

Re: The Day the Music Burned

#46

Post by freewilly1040 »

dehrmann wrote: post #40
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 nihilis…

Yeah, most b-sides are b-sides for a reason.

Re: The Day the Music Burned

#47

Post by mustacheemperor »

pseudolus wrote: post #23

Over the years the film industry has suffered enormous losses as well, in part because early movies used nitrocellulose based film stock which is highly flammable and susceptible to spontaneous combustion. The 1937 Fox vault fire is one of many examples of film loss that has continued to the present [0]. Sadly, the existence of a large number of silent movies is only known through reviews, film posters and past recol…

The original master tapes of the moon landing TV broadcast were degaussed and written over to save money too.[0] Pretty astonishing!

[0]https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nasa-tapes/moon-landing-t...

Re: The Day the Music Burned

#48

Post by hnruss »

Losing the master tapes is like losing the source code. As the years pass and new OS versions are released, eventually that old executable will stop working. Sure, you'll always be able to run it in a VM, but it'll never get any better.

Re: The Day the Music Burned

#49

Post by andrelaszlo »

dredmorbius wrote: post #24
andrelaszlo wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just out of curiosity, would you have preferred reading it on paper? Long reads on screens are not so fun imo.

Printed to PDF the piece runs 36 pages, about 12,000 words, or roughly an hour's read. It is long.

Exactly, it's more like a short book than a regular article, pretty long even by long-reads standard.

I was curious if people rather read content like this on paper than scrolling for an hour on a screen :)

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