The notion of taking a studio “offline” is not new, it’s been that way since the dawn of digital recording and the internet.
We got our start recording digitally in the late 90’s. It was obviously problematic for us to be online then because we were broke and had to pirate everything. Connecting to the internet would have caused some of the software to check for licenses which would have tanked our studio and means of scraping a living.
In the early 2000’s when we were less dependent on 1GB SCSI arrays and stolen software, there was a new issue: software updating or connecting during a session would cause CPU timing issues and you’d get pops in your recordings or weird monitoring latency.
This issue is perennial. Now we also deal with the OS Self-updating, internet browsers that operate in the background and all the other stuff from the past which is still and issue (legally owned software also continues to check for updates and license keys). On Windows, I’ve found even worse issues with not only downloading updates but crashing my DAW and audio card drivers when I fail to restart. Add in the planned obsolescence of OS, digital tracking initiatives like Google and MS authenticators and it becomes a very scary reality connecting the fragile DAW workstation to a network.
If I still did recording professionally, I’d never allow my workstation on the Internet, but it’s been this way since the beginning, its not a new phenomenon.
Yes, completely agree. I owned a studio for 40 years now and still prefer the no-nonsense of tape... except for the fact that the tape itself has gone downhill. We were involved early on with the development of digital audio in the studio during the mid-80's. It wasn't until the mid 90's we had to remove the digital DAWs off the internet for them to perform correctly.
Currently what we do is keep working DAWs off the internet for long periods of time. If/when we need a substantial upgrade, we buy a new system so we're always backwards compatible (which is also an issue with older files).
Over the years I've calculated the cost of owning a 2" tape machine (which was expensive to buy) and its upkeep with the cost of owning DAWs. After 30 years, the tape machine is still working like a champ and the digital is still costing us a lot of money to remaining "current".
Great reply! I’m really interested in the system duplication that you mentioned. That sounds like you’re effectively buying a new Pro-tools rig every <10 years…not cheap! I’d expect the amount of IT work you need to do to manage these upgrades is substantial, guessing around a week of downtime (Max) and some pretty detailed documents regarding software and settings. I’m a Director if Operations for a trading exchange and I’m seeing your work through my professional lens. I imagine you could easily have a full time IT person for a two-control room studio.
The concept of “bit-rot” is also something that keeps me up at night. Many people seem to be of the opinion that digital files last forever…and maybe it’s true in a very limited sense, but since I started recording digitally, in the x86 PC world (aka: not Apple) we’ve gone from FAT 32 file systems on a scsi array of three 1 GB hard drives to NTFS and in some cases back to FAT 32. I can’t even attach many of the old drives I have to any existing computer without 3rd party retro-fits. Whatever data is there is basically gone or (if I’m lucky) on decaying CDRs.
Drives fail spectacularly and often, backups can become corrupted, and most importantly, DAW project files and plugins change every few years making it difficult to open old projects (I’ve found Ableton Live actually handles this well and surprisingly great as a full-functioning DAW—I’ll never go back to Cubase/Nuendo).
Anyway, my point is that as a quasi-amateur, I expect that the minute I die, all of the projects on my current workstation will begin to disappear in the sense that anyone interested in my life’s work (kids, grandkids, old band mates?) will have mere months to go through it all before it becomes difficult to the point of pointlessness. This is already a real issue for those of us trying to recover the work of a dear friend who passed away last year. Currently my focus is to get the best stuff I have into small run vinyl for posterity.
I still have every tape reel me or my friends ever made back in the early 90’s secured in a air-tight and humidity managed cabinet, the sound like gold…at least the ones I have a tape deck for. I think about the world we inhabit with 10k sings a day being released and anyone with headphones and an iPad able to drop a beat. It all seems very fragile and temporary to me, a stepping stone toward the world envisioned by Rush in 2112. So it goes, I suppose.
I hate to sound dismissive of what is clearly an important problem - one that I have not been directly responsible for. But I think there are business reasons why music archives are not appropriately backed up. Even I am familiar with the fact that tape catalogs have been destroyed by fires here in Los Angeles.
As a data engineer, like most people with decades of experience in the IT industry, I have worked through many struggles over the years in maintaining backups of my own data and that of my customers. Let us assume, however, that the music industry came up with a reasonable high fidelity standard for DAC from end-to-end. Once that was accomplished there are cloud storage and data management standards that are available to business that are not only significantly permanent, but can be contractually guaranteed. The contracts can also be made to include take out rights - which means the service provider must give you back your originals on demand in a fee-for-service model.
You can certainly imagine what the NSA spends keeping digital records of what they have recorded from SIGINT bugs in Putin's offices. Surely we can handle a couple million digital masters in a tiny fraction of AWS' data center footprint. I find it hard to believe that Qobuz or Tidal (with no respect to their encoding standard) would say such a thing is impossible.
On the other hand I am in absolute agreement when it comes to the breadth and depth of what today's streaming services provide to their subscribing customers. That business sucks and I'm going to continue to keep all of my physical CDs. But I am digital first and I insure that my terabytes are backed up redundantly. In fact, my problem is more one of deduplication than loss.
I have no disrespect for analog recording primarily because it is a mature technology. I distinguish between digital for digital's sake and bringing forward the advantages that a well-managed digital environment can consistently deliver. People who don't do data management well are just being cheap - I suppose analogously like kids who used to use TDK D-120s instead of TDK SA-90s, some of which I still have. But if the cheap business models erode the capacity for good recording equipment to be manufactured that's the big problem. But today, the music industry (given a tip-top digital standard) could take advantage of what IT has learned in data management, redundant storage, disaster recovery and service level agreements.
I agree with everything, my position is more of a, “yes and…”
1. Yes, Putin and…us too! SIGINT watches everyone (thanks Snowden), not merely High Profile People. Assume no security except that which you negotiate, and then cross your fingers.
Which leads to the main point: everything exists on a priority spectrum. That usually has to be learned…usually by losing stuff. I’ve lost plenty of analog and digital music along the way, and have tapes that I’m ready to dub over because the value of tape is more than the crap audio. (I recently picked up a Tascam 4-track at a pawn shop and it was an unbelievable trip through time—highly recommended!)
The cloud stuff is a very important component and, fwiw, AWS is pretty cheap (free to setup and start practicing on, FWIW). A NAS is a no-brainer, USB drives, etc. it’s definitely easier to backup than it’s ever been, though I hate to think what I’d need to do to resurrect my old SCSI drives or ADATs. That stuff is dead to me because it’s already either somewhere else or not worth recovering.
I would still purport that there is an attrition rate for historical documents and relics and that digital may extend the lifecycle by some percent, but ultimately contracts end, instances fail and never get rebooted, businesses and technology change. The onus for preservation will always be with us and some thought needs to be put into choosing what one saves.
Personally, I’ve always enjoyed the impermanent aspect of art; it keeps it dangerous. But professional and artistic standards are not the same. I presume that at this point data warehousing is a service a studio might provide. But I can also imagine handing two hard disks to an artist and saying, “Thanks for the business, good luck. Next!”
Thank you for your response! As a 'quasi-amateur' you are more astute than most pros I am meeting lately and definitely more knowledgable than graduates of audio school. FYI, I have a few substacks addressing several subjects in audio production from creation to distribution.
One of the things I stress in my various role as advisory person on a few audio schools is teaching how to preserve digital and analog recordings. You have guessed correctly and identified the issues.
Yes, we have a one full time person working on backup in the studio. We used to say for digital, "if you don't have it backed up, it doesn't exist". Now, that's more like have 2-3 backups. Managing files is huge. I won't get into the details but professionals need to consider maintaining legacy gear for restoration - especially considering new systems of listening like ATMOS. We maintain several systems that are 20 years old or more. We also work with digital tape systems (DAT, F-1) that go back more than 30 years. Yes, it's MUCH easier to maintain analog tape. When digital tape degrades, it literally goes to "nothing"... as if it was never recorded.
Our digital backup systems includes backing up to AWS and setting up artist systems for google drive. We also have 2 redundant Buffalo drives (mega terabytes that we have to replace about every 5 years) and several large local hard drives for working projects, also always backed up.
Our current DAWs are all 10 years or more old, with limited plugins (which also need updating). I tend to mix running through an analog console using analog effects and printing those effect in digital so I'm less reliant on plugin. The DAWs are Pyramix/PC (for DSD256 recording), Protools/Mac, Samplitude and a few others. The ADDA sound fantastic and no reason to change unless we want to mix in ATMOS. Yes, we would buy completey new system if we go that route. At the moment, consideriing all the costs involved, it might be cheaper to hire a buddy's studio and concentrate on being a producer. Considering the revenue stream for music isn't going up, I might just take up golf. :)
I'm easy to find on the internet if you have a quick question or a restoration project.
How very interesting! The role of and engineer seems to be evolving and combining elements of arcane knowledge and bleeding edge tech. I would also hazard that it’s one of the dwindling spaces where mentorship is crucial in maintaining the business. I have a general sense that our society has lost a lot of the old-to-young practical knowledge transfer that used to happen via apprenticeship and mentoring.
I run a book publishing company and I stopped updating Adobe applications past CS version 6. They lock you in the subscriber model forever, disable your software if you no longer want to pay, and i can't see any off-ramp. No thanks. Plus updates disable key features: older Type 1 fonts, made by Adobe no less, don't work with the newer software and of course there was the entire Pantone color fiasco.
With regard to 'lost movies,' it is certainly true that motion pictures were thought of a product that had their time and weren't taken all that seriously with regard to preservation until the Museum of Modern Art got involved. What is ironic is that MOMA asked studios for copies of these films with the aim to preserve them themselves if the studios weren't going to do it, and they were more often than not turned down.
The other aspect that the author left out is that many missing films continue to turn up. A much longer print of "Metropolis" turned up in Argentina and this film is now a lot more coherent. Archives often don't have a record of the films they have, or have been mislabeled; the films of Charley Bowers were hiding in plain sight in France, because he was known as Bricolo there. There are many such success stories. In a recent Substack article I wrote about recent film preservation projects, I point out that the other thing that brought renewed interest in older movies was video cassette and particularly cable, since the cable companies needed product, and old 16MM prints struck for television back in the fifties were cut up and not acceptable.
Definitely appreciate this practice of sharing articles, planning to do more of this myself. Your community-boosting ethos is exemplary. As always, love that you share your bookshelf! Serpent and Rainbow has always stuck w/ me, and I discovered Kingsley b/c of you. Thanks!
The next step after unplugged is probably emulation. If you have old Mac or PC software, your more modern machine will be unable to run it without a virtual environment. Unless you have lovingly tended an old rig, that's the only way to experience something like Laurie Anderson's Puppet Motel.
You won't be alone. Emulation is has a long tradition in computing. Back in the 1960s, the most commonly executed program on the IBM 360 was an IBM 1401 emulator. I did some work for a major airline in the 1990s. They were running their flight planning software under an emulator. The machine it was written for and likely the company that manufactured it no longer existed.
It helps that modern computers are so much faster than earlier machines. There are old Macintosh emulations that run in one's browser at reasonable speed. A typical JPG image nowadays is bigger than the storage on the original Mac. That airline eventually rewrote new software, but they are used to buying things like $250M airplanes. For decades, they relied on a company that specialized in supporting antique software under emulation. Given how much software is now mission critical for the rest of us, I wouldn't be surprised if emulation moves more mainstream with companies focusing on various markets like, for example, music studio support.
P.S. It isn't even just end users. Software developers love Docker because it lets the freeze a system configuration. It's the Red Queen Hypothesis gone mad.
Automatic software updates have had an impact on me in several ways. My phone, of course. It will, quite unpredictably change how it works. Often in a way that seems worse to me. It may be better for some, but not for me.
Or games I play (computer games). The updates or expansions aren't always better than the original, but there's no way to go back to the thing I loved.
And computer software that I use for programming often changes without much warning. Libraries and/or frameworks will update in a way that disrupts my workflow. This is the situation most like those recording studios. I know how chaotic it is when I have to port to the new release in the middle of something else, and I'm not on much of a production schedule.
Automatic updates exist for a reason. The reason is that people might well never do it otherwise, and on balance, that's a bad thing. But yikes, the situation we are in has me constantly asking, "Who owns this computer anyway?"
I still have a 2012 Dell laptop with Win 7 for a backup computer. I've never updated the software and it works fine. My 2 yr. old HP laptop with Win 10, updates automatically and there is always a new problem to deal with.
Hey Ted, your quest for useful music, let me point to that scene in Strange Encounter's of the Third Kind. Yeah that 1977 pop sci fi movie. The scene were humans and aliens finally catch up with one another. How did they try to communicate? Music! Those famous chords you heard everywhere back then. After the human's computer and the alien's exchanged those chords they began really sending music back and forth, ever faster. Its been along time but I think I remember it was a little jumbled up sounds and tonal at that! But that was the movie folks ideas of what it would sound like had it actually happened. Main point: rather than some advanced binary buzzing they choose music to do the very fundamental first contact stuff.
The hand signals used in that film are from the Kodaly pedagogy system....they are a way to communicate which notes are to be sung, without using music notation. Tesla said in order to understand the Universe we have to understand frequency and vibration. So the film seems to reflect that!
I like going offline. For example, I've got an older car which I will likely keep for a long time because it is dependable/reliable and is completely offline. I've resisted having Alexa or any other "convenient" (aka intrusive) type thing in my home. I like paying cash and have resisted all payment apps on my phone (although using credit/debit cards is obviously not offline). I'm seriously considering getting a dumb flip phone, especially if the government continues to spy on its citizens.
All artists ( musicians, painters, sculptors and culinary )and gardeners share bits of Wicca. Songwriters seem to have the biggest share, since their intention is to sway the audience to a particular emotional direction. …Just sayin’…
It's most evident in film/video/movies/tv. The music sets up the audience to emotionally experience what the director wants them to experience. The setup always occurs just before the scene. We are manipulated daily. One of the advantages of watching a movie in a country where I don't speak the language is that I respond emotionally to what I see and read in the subtitles, instead of being set up to feel what the director wants me to feel.
I work in the music instrument industry, and my experience is that studios are always trying to balance stability and familiarity with would-be clients who call and ask "Do you have the latest X? No? Okay, bye!" There's no space to say "No, but I have this other thing which works fine..." and sometimes the would-be client is wanting to bring in a project they've started at home on a more recent version of the software, using plugins which the studio doesn't own, doesn't really want to buy, and may not even be compatible with.
I'm not sure I've ever been in a professional studio that wasn't based on a system that wasn't at least five years old. The number of people holding on to Pro Tools 10 is not insignificant.
Great recommendations. I look forward to reading this regularly. I really value digests. Interesting how a circumspection is growing about computer technology and its potentially destabilising effects.
I enjoyed reading the recommendations. Was surprised at the music studios going unplugged but I understand that frequent software upgrades are cubersome. The reaction is radical but I’ve been thinking a lot lately that there’s a tendency towards going analogue in certain aspects of life, art. I’m also thinking about my writing which for now is 100% digital. Let’s see.
The notion of taking a studio “offline” is not new, it’s been that way since the dawn of digital recording and the internet.
We got our start recording digitally in the late 90’s. It was obviously problematic for us to be online then because we were broke and had to pirate everything. Connecting to the internet would have caused some of the software to check for licenses which would have tanked our studio and means of scraping a living.
In the early 2000’s when we were less dependent on 1GB SCSI arrays and stolen software, there was a new issue: software updating or connecting during a session would cause CPU timing issues and you’d get pops in your recordings or weird monitoring latency.
This issue is perennial. Now we also deal with the OS Self-updating, internet browsers that operate in the background and all the other stuff from the past which is still and issue (legally owned software also continues to check for updates and license keys). On Windows, I’ve found even worse issues with not only downloading updates but crashing my DAW and audio card drivers when I fail to restart. Add in the planned obsolescence of OS, digital tracking initiatives like Google and MS authenticators and it becomes a very scary reality connecting the fragile DAW workstation to a network.
If I still did recording professionally, I’d never allow my workstation on the Internet, but it’s been this way since the beginning, its not a new phenomenon.
Yes, completely agree. I owned a studio for 40 years now and still prefer the no-nonsense of tape... except for the fact that the tape itself has gone downhill. We were involved early on with the development of digital audio in the studio during the mid-80's. It wasn't until the mid 90's we had to remove the digital DAWs off the internet for them to perform correctly.
Currently what we do is keep working DAWs off the internet for long periods of time. If/when we need a substantial upgrade, we buy a new system so we're always backwards compatible (which is also an issue with older files).
Over the years I've calculated the cost of owning a 2" tape machine (which was expensive to buy) and its upkeep with the cost of owning DAWs. After 30 years, the tape machine is still working like a champ and the digital is still costing us a lot of money to remaining "current".
Cookie Marenco
Founder Blue Coast Records and Music
Great reply! I’m really interested in the system duplication that you mentioned. That sounds like you’re effectively buying a new Pro-tools rig every <10 years…not cheap! I’d expect the amount of IT work you need to do to manage these upgrades is substantial, guessing around a week of downtime (Max) and some pretty detailed documents regarding software and settings. I’m a Director if Operations for a trading exchange and I’m seeing your work through my professional lens. I imagine you could easily have a full time IT person for a two-control room studio.
The concept of “bit-rot” is also something that keeps me up at night. Many people seem to be of the opinion that digital files last forever…and maybe it’s true in a very limited sense, but since I started recording digitally, in the x86 PC world (aka: not Apple) we’ve gone from FAT 32 file systems on a scsi array of three 1 GB hard drives to NTFS and in some cases back to FAT 32. I can’t even attach many of the old drives I have to any existing computer without 3rd party retro-fits. Whatever data is there is basically gone or (if I’m lucky) on decaying CDRs.
Drives fail spectacularly and often, backups can become corrupted, and most importantly, DAW project files and plugins change every few years making it difficult to open old projects (I’ve found Ableton Live actually handles this well and surprisingly great as a full-functioning DAW—I’ll never go back to Cubase/Nuendo).
Anyway, my point is that as a quasi-amateur, I expect that the minute I die, all of the projects on my current workstation will begin to disappear in the sense that anyone interested in my life’s work (kids, grandkids, old band mates?) will have mere months to go through it all before it becomes difficult to the point of pointlessness. This is already a real issue for those of us trying to recover the work of a dear friend who passed away last year. Currently my focus is to get the best stuff I have into small run vinyl for posterity.
I still have every tape reel me or my friends ever made back in the early 90’s secured in a air-tight and humidity managed cabinet, the sound like gold…at least the ones I have a tape deck for. I think about the world we inhabit with 10k sings a day being released and anyone with headphones and an iPad able to drop a beat. It all seems very fragile and temporary to me, a stepping stone toward the world envisioned by Rush in 2112. So it goes, I suppose.
I hate to sound dismissive of what is clearly an important problem - one that I have not been directly responsible for. But I think there are business reasons why music archives are not appropriately backed up. Even I am familiar with the fact that tape catalogs have been destroyed by fires here in Los Angeles.
As a data engineer, like most people with decades of experience in the IT industry, I have worked through many struggles over the years in maintaining backups of my own data and that of my customers. Let us assume, however, that the music industry came up with a reasonable high fidelity standard for DAC from end-to-end. Once that was accomplished there are cloud storage and data management standards that are available to business that are not only significantly permanent, but can be contractually guaranteed. The contracts can also be made to include take out rights - which means the service provider must give you back your originals on demand in a fee-for-service model.
You can certainly imagine what the NSA spends keeping digital records of what they have recorded from SIGINT bugs in Putin's offices. Surely we can handle a couple million digital masters in a tiny fraction of AWS' data center footprint. I find it hard to believe that Qobuz or Tidal (with no respect to their encoding standard) would say such a thing is impossible.
On the other hand I am in absolute agreement when it comes to the breadth and depth of what today's streaming services provide to their subscribing customers. That business sucks and I'm going to continue to keep all of my physical CDs. But I am digital first and I insure that my terabytes are backed up redundantly. In fact, my problem is more one of deduplication than loss.
I have no disrespect for analog recording primarily because it is a mature technology. I distinguish between digital for digital's sake and bringing forward the advantages that a well-managed digital environment can consistently deliver. People who don't do data management well are just being cheap - I suppose analogously like kids who used to use TDK D-120s instead of TDK SA-90s, some of which I still have. But if the cheap business models erode the capacity for good recording equipment to be manufactured that's the big problem. But today, the music industry (given a tip-top digital standard) could take advantage of what IT has learned in data management, redundant storage, disaster recovery and service level agreements.
I agree with everything, my position is more of a, “yes and…”
1. Yes, Putin and…us too! SIGINT watches everyone (thanks Snowden), not merely High Profile People. Assume no security except that which you negotiate, and then cross your fingers.
Which leads to the main point: everything exists on a priority spectrum. That usually has to be learned…usually by losing stuff. I’ve lost plenty of analog and digital music along the way, and have tapes that I’m ready to dub over because the value of tape is more than the crap audio. (I recently picked up a Tascam 4-track at a pawn shop and it was an unbelievable trip through time—highly recommended!)
The cloud stuff is a very important component and, fwiw, AWS is pretty cheap (free to setup and start practicing on, FWIW). A NAS is a no-brainer, USB drives, etc. it’s definitely easier to backup than it’s ever been, though I hate to think what I’d need to do to resurrect my old SCSI drives or ADATs. That stuff is dead to me because it’s already either somewhere else or not worth recovering.
I would still purport that there is an attrition rate for historical documents and relics and that digital may extend the lifecycle by some percent, but ultimately contracts end, instances fail and never get rebooted, businesses and technology change. The onus for preservation will always be with us and some thought needs to be put into choosing what one saves.
Personally, I’ve always enjoyed the impermanent aspect of art; it keeps it dangerous. But professional and artistic standards are not the same. I presume that at this point data warehousing is a service a studio might provide. But I can also imagine handing two hard disks to an artist and saying, “Thanks for the business, good luck. Next!”
Amen and thanks.
Here's my strategy. But also I'm invested in co-ops. It makes sense to network home labs with people you trust. https://mdcbowen.substack.com/p/seven-rules-for-saving-all-your-stuff
Thank you for your response! As a 'quasi-amateur' you are more astute than most pros I am meeting lately and definitely more knowledgable than graduates of audio school. FYI, I have a few substacks addressing several subjects in audio production from creation to distribution.
One of the things I stress in my various role as advisory person on a few audio schools is teaching how to preserve digital and analog recordings. You have guessed correctly and identified the issues.
Yes, we have a one full time person working on backup in the studio. We used to say for digital, "if you don't have it backed up, it doesn't exist". Now, that's more like have 2-3 backups. Managing files is huge. I won't get into the details but professionals need to consider maintaining legacy gear for restoration - especially considering new systems of listening like ATMOS. We maintain several systems that are 20 years old or more. We also work with digital tape systems (DAT, F-1) that go back more than 30 years. Yes, it's MUCH easier to maintain analog tape. When digital tape degrades, it literally goes to "nothing"... as if it was never recorded.
Our digital backup systems includes backing up to AWS and setting up artist systems for google drive. We also have 2 redundant Buffalo drives (mega terabytes that we have to replace about every 5 years) and several large local hard drives for working projects, also always backed up.
Our current DAWs are all 10 years or more old, with limited plugins (which also need updating). I tend to mix running through an analog console using analog effects and printing those effect in digital so I'm less reliant on plugin. The DAWs are Pyramix/PC (for DSD256 recording), Protools/Mac, Samplitude and a few others. The ADDA sound fantastic and no reason to change unless we want to mix in ATMOS. Yes, we would buy completey new system if we go that route. At the moment, consideriing all the costs involved, it might be cheaper to hire a buddy's studio and concentrate on being a producer. Considering the revenue stream for music isn't going up, I might just take up golf. :)
I'm easy to find on the internet if you have a quick question or a restoration project.
Cookie Marenco
Blue Coast Records and Music
How very interesting! The role of and engineer seems to be evolving and combining elements of arcane knowledge and bleeding edge tech. I would also hazard that it’s one of the dwindling spaces where mentorship is crucial in maintaining the business. I have a general sense that our society has lost a lot of the old-to-young practical knowledge transfer that used to happen via apprenticeship and mentoring.
I should add , this is all prior to addressing the virus/malware elephant in the room.
I run a book publishing company and I stopped updating Adobe applications past CS version 6. They lock you in the subscriber model forever, disable your software if you no longer want to pay, and i can't see any off-ramp. No thanks. Plus updates disable key features: older Type 1 fonts, made by Adobe no less, don't work with the newer software and of course there was the entire Pantone color fiasco.
With regard to 'lost movies,' it is certainly true that motion pictures were thought of a product that had their time and weren't taken all that seriously with regard to preservation until the Museum of Modern Art got involved. What is ironic is that MOMA asked studios for copies of these films with the aim to preserve them themselves if the studios weren't going to do it, and they were more often than not turned down.
The other aspect that the author left out is that many missing films continue to turn up. A much longer print of "Metropolis" turned up in Argentina and this film is now a lot more coherent. Archives often don't have a record of the films they have, or have been mislabeled; the films of Charley Bowers were hiding in plain sight in France, because he was known as Bricolo there. There are many such success stories. In a recent Substack article I wrote about recent film preservation projects, I point out that the other thing that brought renewed interest in older movies was video cassette and particularly cable, since the cable companies needed product, and old 16MM prints struck for television back in the fifties were cut up and not acceptable.
Definitely appreciate this practice of sharing articles, planning to do more of this myself. Your community-boosting ethos is exemplary. As always, love that you share your bookshelf! Serpent and Rainbow has always stuck w/ me, and I discovered Kingsley b/c of you. Thanks!
The next step after unplugged is probably emulation. If you have old Mac or PC software, your more modern machine will be unable to run it without a virtual environment. Unless you have lovingly tended an old rig, that's the only way to experience something like Laurie Anderson's Puppet Motel.
You won't be alone. Emulation is has a long tradition in computing. Back in the 1960s, the most commonly executed program on the IBM 360 was an IBM 1401 emulator. I did some work for a major airline in the 1990s. They were running their flight planning software under an emulator. The machine it was written for and likely the company that manufactured it no longer existed.
It helps that modern computers are so much faster than earlier machines. There are old Macintosh emulations that run in one's browser at reasonable speed. A typical JPG image nowadays is bigger than the storage on the original Mac. That airline eventually rewrote new software, but they are used to buying things like $250M airplanes. For decades, they relied on a company that specialized in supporting antique software under emulation. Given how much software is now mission critical for the rest of us, I wouldn't be surprised if emulation moves more mainstream with companies focusing on various markets like, for example, music studio support.
P.S. It isn't even just end users. Software developers love Docker because it lets the freeze a system configuration. It's the Red Queen Hypothesis gone mad.
Automatic software updates have had an impact on me in several ways. My phone, of course. It will, quite unpredictably change how it works. Often in a way that seems worse to me. It may be better for some, but not for me.
Or games I play (computer games). The updates or expansions aren't always better than the original, but there's no way to go back to the thing I loved.
And computer software that I use for programming often changes without much warning. Libraries and/or frameworks will update in a way that disrupts my workflow. This is the situation most like those recording studios. I know how chaotic it is when I have to port to the new release in the middle of something else, and I'm not on much of a production schedule.
Automatic updates exist for a reason. The reason is that people might well never do it otherwise, and on balance, that's a bad thing. But yikes, the situation we are in has me constantly asking, "Who owns this computer anyway?"
I still have a 2012 Dell laptop with Win 7 for a backup computer. I've never updated the software and it works fine. My 2 yr. old HP laptop with Win 10, updates automatically and there is always a new problem to deal with.
Hey Ted, your quest for useful music, let me point to that scene in Strange Encounter's of the Third Kind. Yeah that 1977 pop sci fi movie. The scene were humans and aliens finally catch up with one another. How did they try to communicate? Music! Those famous chords you heard everywhere back then. After the human's computer and the alien's exchanged those chords they began really sending music back and forth, ever faster. Its been along time but I think I remember it was a little jumbled up sounds and tonal at that! But that was the movie folks ideas of what it would sound like had it actually happened. Main point: rather than some advanced binary buzzing they choose music to do the very fundamental first contact stuff.
The hand signals used in that film are from the Kodaly pedagogy system....they are a way to communicate which notes are to be sung, without using music notation. Tesla said in order to understand the Universe we have to understand frequency and vibration. So the film seems to reflect that!
I like going offline. For example, I've got an older car which I will likely keep for a long time because it is dependable/reliable and is completely offline. I've resisted having Alexa or any other "convenient" (aka intrusive) type thing in my home. I like paying cash and have resisted all payment apps on my phone (although using credit/debit cards is obviously not offline). I'm seriously considering getting a dumb flip phone, especially if the government continues to spy on its citizens.
The govt. will continue to spy on its citizens. most govts. do that and have done that since Genesis.
Actually I’m sorry to say getting a dumb flip phone won’t help much.
for an uneducated observer, why not? I understand all voice is digital anyways, but wouldn't not having other data, camera, etc. help?
Nice! These audio technicians have taken the saying 'unplugged' literally.
All artists ( musicians, painters, sculptors and culinary )and gardeners share bits of Wicca. Songwriters seem to have the biggest share, since their intention is to sway the audience to a particular emotional direction. …Just sayin’…
It's most evident in film/video/movies/tv. The music sets up the audience to emotionally experience what the director wants them to experience. The setup always occurs just before the scene. We are manipulated daily. One of the advantages of watching a movie in a country where I don't speak the language is that I respond emotionally to what I see and read in the subtitles, instead of being set up to feel what the director wants me to feel.
Really? That’s kinda great to know!
Fascinating!
I always enjoy your recommendations on any subject, so yes, I’d enjoy more of this.
I work in the music instrument industry, and my experience is that studios are always trying to balance stability and familiarity with would-be clients who call and ask "Do you have the latest X? No? Okay, bye!" There's no space to say "No, but I have this other thing which works fine..." and sometimes the would-be client is wanting to bring in a project they've started at home on a more recent version of the software, using plugins which the studio doesn't own, doesn't really want to buy, and may not even be compatible with.
I'm not sure I've ever been in a professional studio that wasn't based on a system that wasn't at least five years old. The number of people holding on to Pro Tools 10 is not insignificant.
I first heard about taking a studio "offline" when I interviewed David Torn in 2017 for All About Jazz: https://www.allaboutjazz.com/david-torn-making-records-film-composition-and-working-with-david-bowie-david-torn-by-mark-sullivan I don't think it made it into the article, but he said his main recording and production rig would be rendered unusable if he tried to update the software.
Great recommendations. I look forward to reading this regularly. I really value digests. Interesting how a circumspection is growing about computer technology and its potentially destabilising effects.
I enjoyed reading the recommendations. Was surprised at the music studios going unplugged but I understand that frequent software upgrades are cubersome. The reaction is radical but I’ve been thinking a lot lately that there’s a tendency towards going analogue in certain aspects of life, art. I’m also thinking about my writing which for now is 100% digital. Let’s see.