Bit rot

Thanks to Tim Boyce of Masterdisk for bringing to my attention this irreverent (but for the most part solid) article on Gizmodo about digital data preservation. We are beginnig to realize the cost of keeping so much data in digital form. That is why my mantra is "prioritize, prioritize, prioritize"...

Archives News!

Not one, but two articles on the first page of today's New York Times highlight archives. The first one is about the challenges of archiving born-digital material (in this case, Salman Rushdie's new exhibit at Emory); the other one, the very exciting news of the 160,000 hours of C-SPAN video now freely available on the Internet. It does not appear that C-SPAN has a viable business model for their web site yet, but I applaud the herculean effort that this enterprise represents. We live in wondrous times.

Coming soon: An 8-track museum

There is a cute article on the Wall Street Journal (thank you Andy Lanset) about an 8-track collector in Texas trying to build a museum. There are some errors in the article (for example, the idea that 8-tracks are sonically superior), but it is quite amusing.

Introducing the Selenophon

This one I had never seen before. Thanks to Jeff Berman, who generously gave me some old radio-related magazines, I learned about the Selenophon, which is essentially a variable-density paper-strip player (and thus can be called a direct descendant of Léon Scott's 1860 phonoautograph). Built in Austria, it may also be considered a precursor of the later (and much-malighned) 8-track cartridge, since it also carries eight (mono) tracks per side, for a total of 16. Note also the news announcement about the long-playing (LP) record, running at 33 1/3 rpm.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Archives

There is a nice new article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer about the archives at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, headed by good pal Andy Leach. Andy and I used to work together in Chicago's Center for Black Music Research, and he is the nicest guy, as well as a heck of a pedal-steel player (he can be heard in my CD). Way to go Andy! You just may have the most fun job in the field.

Wow & Flutter

Last week-end we went to Wow & Flutter, a performance by Andrew Schneider at the Chocolate Factory in Long Island City. I could not resist the name. After so many years trying to minimize it (and finally getting rid of it in digital --unless you count jitter as a form of flutter), I seek it! The piece was more related to distortions of memory than about our woes with tape. The review in the New York Times is pretty accurate.(Incidentally, I just read about a homemade wow & flutter meter --for the advanced hobbyist).

Speaking of flutter, I am a big fan of Jamie Howarth' s Plangent Processes, which digitally removes extremely small flutter artifacts inherent in the mechanical nature of tape recordings (bearings, idlers, etc). It is probably the only restoration process I have ever heard that created a marked improvement without any side effects.

Digital doomsday

There is a new article on the possible loss of digital information in New Scientist. It naturally focuses on scientific data and seems to strike a good balance between alarm and acceptance. The issues affect us all, but in the end it does seem a bit short-sighted when compared to the incredibly vast amount of information that has already been lost through the centuries (or even decades: interestingly enough, a lot of the information on, say, natural remedies that was commonplace two generations ago is quite obscure these days).

What we need to accept is that civilizations and cultures change and with them there is always a change in priorities, which inevitable implies losses. But the article makes a good point in that the amount of energy needed to keep digital data current is very large. When I hear of efforts to keep our audio heritage digitally alive for generations and generations, I cannot help but be a bit skeptic.

Digital preservation is to analog preservation what a car is to a bicycle: yes, theoretically you can get much farther (without wear), but you need much more energy to get there.