best archival medium?

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xxxdougxxx

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If you had to choose one media for archival purposes-- for the ages-- what would it be, and why??

(If you were an alien from another planet, and you picked a vinyl record, a cassette tape, and a compact disk, which one would you be most likely to recognize as an audio recording, and which one would you most likely be able to actually listen to by cobbling together some sort of crude playback apparatus?)

I favor the analog because there's no simple, DIY way of playing back digital recording. Probably vinyl, because you don't even electricity to play it back. You could put a needle on there and crank it by hand.
 
xxxdougxxx said:
I favor the analog because there's no simple, DIY way of playing back digital recording. Probably vinyl, because you don't even electricity to play it back. You could put a needle on there and crank it by hand.
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You are basically talking about end of civilization kind of scenarios here. At that point nobody, including you, is going to care about the music you archived. All you are going to care about is hunting or scavenging your next meal.

There actually is a great way to archive multi-track digital recordings in DAW. What you do is consolidate each track, meaning you make each track a full length WAV audio file, each of the same length. Then you save those to the most commonly used data medium at the time. This means that when you want to recreate your song, all you ahve to do is line each track up to the same start time and hit play.

In my opinion, the best archiving format is always the most basic and commonly used possible. So for example, if you want to save recipes digitalyl you save them as TEXT files. That works for any text, actually. If you want to save audio files you save them as straight WAV files. Any kind of proprietary format is the worst way to archive.
 
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