Continuing with CDs?

cant wait to record a bunch of sex noises to vinyl so that way future civilizations can look back and say, wow, they were horny as HELL

same

if anyone has a second and needs a wtf / lol look up the millennial disc, the golden cd mormons made that will last a thousand years

solving all of these problems

I bought three used CDs today

until jesus comes again xp

wasn't it Sanpaku who was talking about inscribing books onto nickel plates to survive the apocalypse? surely we could do that with records:

https://i0.wp.com/ajournalofmusicalthings.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Cereal-Box-Records.jpg?resize=620%2C350

https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/

What with ripping, transcoding, backing up, importing, cleaning up track names etc there are many many CDs in my collection that I have spent considerable time archiving and zero time listening to in the 4-5 years since archiving them.

i was reminded of a few sites that show you random YouTube videos with few or no hits... I couldn't remember the name of one... and I found this very fitting new one: http://astronaut.io/ Now watching some unappreciated art as my soul leaves my body

this is too cool!

I bought three used CDs today

Yes, because I'm working in the evenings, and am usually not very busy, I got back into browsing for bargains, because bored, and have bought a lot of CDs in the last six months or so, more than I had in the last six years. Mostly new, but some used. I also play CDs all the time at home.

the physical/digital divide is inexistent and misleading, everything is physical.
cds are as digital as the cloud, vinyl isn't. bits on a server farm and our access to them are prone to disappearing as are our cds and photo negatives. cloud is someone else's computer, fuck the cloud, etc

the digital/analogue divide otoh is real but it's not about physical degradation of the underlying medium and playback equipment but about ease and fidelity of replication. you can endlessly reproduce digital information assuming you have the resources for it, not so for analogue

hot takes: writing is digital. paper books are digital information carriers, not analogue, unless they have printed images. digital > analogue for long-term preservation

eventually the internet will host a digital copy of every piece of that humanity has ever produced

always hilarious to see ppl credulously spout this nonsense

yeah with each new major shift in medium, the less there is available overall. see also: movies

exactly. So many comics, books, movies, records that haven't made it through each successive shift

that's true I guess, but there's also a lot of stuff that was pretty much unfindable in the pre-internet age that was eventually uploaded by a random person to youtube or some torrent site or whatever so that all of a sudden it becomes easily accessible to anyone with an internet connection. I am pretty sure that there is a lot more pre-internet media easily available to most people today than there was in say 1995.

^^ This also true. Growing up in the 80s I read about all sorts of music that I just couldn't access.

that is true but it is an altogether different statement

board descrip

there's also a lot of stuff that was pretty much unfindable in the pre-internet age that was eventually uploaded by a random person to youtube or some torrent site or whatever

Until the moment some copyright holder yanks the torrent or the likely-shit-quality YouTube video. Yes, some things reappear, but it's nothing compared to what's lost, and it's even less reliable than traditional physical media. Similarly, if you rely upon Spotify for your new discoveries of old music, you're gonna be SOL when they inevitably collapse.

case in point: that cool Eno documentary about the making of "Here Come The Warm Jets" that was on YT for a couple of hours and now only exists as files on various hard drives

Looks like it's still up here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/z1lqe3b4npusqnv/ENO%20-%20Alphons%20Sinniger.mp4?dl=0

oh, nice, thanks! I was playing the crap out of Warm Jets in the fall and didn't know about this video.

The 'everything ever all the time' hypothesis does rely on some sort of currently unthinkable global rights-holder coordination. It is funny to think that obscure digital titles may eventually be some of the most obscure media of all -- like the above Eno thing. I'm sure I've paid for such little indie films in the pre-Kickstarter era that I would have no idea where to find right now, that never got distributed on disc. Hope I have them on a backup somewhere! Probably not.

download and/or streamrip early. download and/or streamrip often.

holy shit @ that Eno doc btw

ha, I'm glad it got a little revive! it is amazing.

"cds are as digital as the cloud, vinyl isn't"

vinyl doesn't become digital just because the master was. the medium dictates whether the information it contains is analogue or digital. continuous grooves in a platter are analogue, discrete pits and lands in a shiny disc are digital

you can make an 100% identical copy of a cd just like you can exactly transcribe a book word for word but if you feed the output of a vinyl player to an ADC you get a slightly different signal each time

pedantry over, sorry, here's a cool article on the challenges of digital preservation of movies:
http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2012/02/13/pandoras-digital-box-pix-and-pixels/

sure, but if you press vinyl from the original analog tapes there (can be) greater dynamic range than if you press from a digital source as I understood it, plz correct me i I'm wrong. I think there are real reasons that "mastered from the original tapes" is a selling point.

Vinyl and CD require different mastering processes. With vinyl, bass frequencies need to be centered, and heavy bass near the inner groove can make things muddy (or so mastering engineers have told me).

I don’t believe it makes any difference to the dynamic range if vinyl is mastered from an analog or digital source. But if vinyl is mastered from the same master used for the CD — or if it’s mastered from an actual CD (as majors have been known to do) — it’ll sound less-than-great, because it’s not mastered from a source optimized for vinyl.

that makes more sense, thx

There definitely can be real reasons why “mastered from the original tapes” is a selling point, like if there are nth-generation “masters” floating around that the record (CD or vinyl) had been mastered from for however many years. iirc (and I may be wrong about this), In The Court Of The Crimson King had used a not-great master for years until it was finally remastered from the original tapes in 2009 or so.

the whole point of mastering for a particular format is that you optimize for that format. the source is just the source. the higher quality it is the better. often that means the original tapes but it doesn't have to. unless i'm missing something?

I think "purely analogue" LPs these days are quite rare — a new pressing advertised as a remaster from the original tapes probably has a high-resolution digital intermediary, unless it's specifically says otherwise.

And of course the original tape may have deteriorated, e.g., the Hoffman forums were full of complaints about dropouts and other problems on some of the latest Bowie reissues, which I believe used the original tapes (at least where they exist).

tracer otm

analogue tapes have lesser dynamic range than redbook (cd) audio, about 13bit. vinyl has less than that.

it doesn't matter if a vinyl is mastered from a digital or analogue tape source because both exceed its capability

thanks, I see now where I got that mistaken idea from (bad CD mastering):

Despite the lower dynamic range and signal-to-noise ratios a vinyl or tape record can achieve in theory (60-80 dB versus 90-96 dB for CD recordings), vinyl records may still be preferred for their greater dynamic range in practice because of aggressive dynamic range compression used for CD audio material (see Loudness war), however unless the vinyl release specifically notes a vinyl mastering credit it is safe to assume it uses the same dynamically-challenged master as the digital versions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_analog_and_digital_recording

PONO-Mastered Vinyl Or GTFO

I think "purely analogue" LPs these days are quite rare

Tony Allen - The Source (2017) was a fully analogue (AAA) vinyl release. There can't be many others.

Vinyl has a very pleasant signature sound, midrangey, sight supression highs, they were using the DiscComputer in the process in the early 80s, having some digital in the process doesn't negate the fact that a record that's well mastered for vinyl can sound amazing

I still think a great record on a great setup is the greatest, though many people never actually hear that anymore

they buy it and put it on the shelf in one of those dumb plastic frames on the wall

fixed that for u

― sleeve

are you making fun of me for decorating my hallway with framed versions of every cover variant of "fate for breakfast"

Kim Deal is 100% analog, from recording to vinyl. She calls it All Wave.

There's a series of Blue Note vinyl reissues that are all-analog, pressed at 45rpm, and very expensive.

Good resource:

https://www.analogplanet.com/category/aaa-vinyl

xxp I actually learned from this thing that All Nerve was mixed in Pro Tools.

what a betrayal! I just threw my copy off the balcony. JK it's a fantastic album and sounds great in my car

Obviously, there are reasons for trying to maintain an all-analog chain aside from any supposed resolution/dynamic range benefits (which, as pointed out above, are likely not true anyway; 24-bit recording+mixing dithered/noise-shaped for 16-bit playback beating just about any tape/vinyl ever made on that score). I think at the Kim D end of things, it's about immediacy and performance and purposely not having the fallback of being able to endlessly edit/comp/shift/etc.

Talking of old formats, I set up a secondhand Pioneer CD Recorder for someone this weekend, popped in a CD-R to dub an LP for the car and realised... it only takes "music" CD-Rs! Remember those? RIAA et al's attempt to add copyright levies for home recording before everyone had burners in their PCs. There's a little code burned into the pre-groove wobble that you can't replicate with software, so I guess I need to find some of these blasted discs. Looks like they're about £90p each. (It will play computer-burned CD-Rs just fine, as, post-finalisation, they just look like regular CDs to the machine).

haha oh man.

the music industry's ingenuity at stopping people listening to their product is really something else

I did mean 90p, not £90 up there, in case that wasn't clear. Still, that's 6x the price of yr regular CD-Rs. Managed to find a spindle of ten Maxell CD-RWs ("for Music") for a tenner but...the reviews are split on whether these actually work on standalone recorders or not. The late '90s were *great*. Hacking MiniDiscs so they could store 85min of music... and then sheepishly taking yr deck back to the shop because was making a terrible grinding noise as a result.

Mike I think I have "music" CDrs knocking about from the days when I had a CD recorder, if you only need (literally) one or two?