Audio commentary

Somewhere between my dad's garage and a friend's house I have a collection of vinyl records and my old record player. In a trash heap and/or somewhere south of the border is my small collection of 8-track tapes. Between my dad's garage and my room is a large collection of cassettes. Between my room and some unknown shameless thieves' possessions are some 200+ audio CDs. Also in my room are a few binders of MiniDiscs to go with my two now-retired MiniDisc recorder/players that replaced my two now-retired portable cassette players and CD-Walkman. I have purchased many many many items, as have many, in all these obsoleted formats. CDs have a lot of inertia behind them now and thankfully they are digital, but as physical media they may not last. The last batch of audio music that I bought was online directly to my PC.

That last part gave me some cause to rejoice because in a very real way I feel that my format worries are NOW FINALLY OVER. With the advent of ubiquitous PCs, the internet, (relatively) cheap hard-disk storage, and perception-based lossy compression from my very own chosen field of Digital Signal Processing, I may need never trouble myself seriously about physical media again. Thanks to CDs, nearly all available music is available digitally or will be accessible digitally in the future and at the very least convertible to digital storage. Audio buffs may whine and complain about how much better the very best of the analog devices sound, but it's all immaterial because it's good sounding enough and highly portable, highly reliable, and very malleable. When I left the west coast I didn't want to take my records and record player with me so I recorded just about everything to cassette, and later to MiniDisc. That was a verrrry long process since it had to be done real-time and I dread doing it again. Ok, I see that I will have to do it at least partly again to get some rarities from my older media and many things I REFUSE to buy again transferred onto my computer. But I'm less resistant because this *SHOULD* be my last time doing it. Once it's there it should be smooth(er) sailing and I can at least lay part of my fears to rest because so long as music is available digitally it can be almost trivially moved almost anywhere and to almost anything with a fraction of the effort.

This brings me some satisfaction and has caused me to decide to join in on something that a great many people are doing; something that I've been contemplating for a good long while since I all but stopped buying CDs (partly due to grievances with the music industry) but freshly since getting my latest in portable audio gear last year. Rather than audio CDs being the centerpiece of my music collection, it will now be a hard drive attached to a computer. CDs are no longer that convenient to me. Besides, they degrade and a friend of mine who happens to be a head honcho for the Digital Library Project asserts with high authority that CDs are NOT archival. Well, hard-discs aren't either but they can be backed up way more easily and redundantly with scant manual labor. I'm convinced that so long as I live, I will probably have a computer. And so long as I have a computer, I should need never worry about having a place to collect music that will be obsoleted by yet another recorded format. I do not want to buy the same music yet again. I think the music stores should have a deal where if you turn in a purchased item in one format you should get a replacement in the new format. Yah right.

Of course, now comes the other half of the coin. The format problem exists with a vengeance in the digital world. Ugh. A decade ago mp3's emerged on the scene as a disrupting technology that when coupled with the other major disrupting technology of the internet has reduced (or expanded depending on how you look at it) the dependence on physical audio media. Hopefully someday it will also spell the death-knell for corporate music industry too, at least in its current form. Mp3's are still pretty sweet but being one of the early popular formats, it kind of sucks too. Soon after emerged a plethora of competing formats with better compression and better sound from the major corporations and some grass-roots startups to where we now have a dozen or so popular formats, each of which is locked-to a commercial product or locked-out of the commercial market in some way. Microsoft started promoting/forcing its WMA format. Sony stuck to its proprietary ATRAC format. Apple defaults to its DRM'd AAC format. Then there are the host of mostly-computer-only formats, many of them quite impressive and wonderful. At least mp3s remain the most popular format, by inertia of course. Just about everyone has at least agreed to support it in some fashion, but it's plagued by some licensing issues and frankly it has quite a few shortcomings. I prefer it were replaced by the Ogg format but hardly anyone that makes a portable player supports it.

Still, this is a better situation than before. Being digital, the music can fairly easily be converted from one format to another, ableit with some possible loss in quality but not even close to as bad as analog dubbing. Only companies' stubbornness with proprietary formats and the introduction of digital "rights" management schemes truly interfere with the process but those seem to be overcome as quickly as they are introduced. So the choice for me now is what format I want to archive my music collection: the ever-present mp3 that refuses to die and therefore offers some security, but isn't the best? or some other format that is "better" but possibly less supported or possibly restricted. At the moment I'm strongly considering Ogg or FLAC, both of which are open-source and therefore nearly guaranteed to always be readable and decodable (unlike, say, old MS Office documents) but which require differing amounts of storage space and cost and will require the additional annoying step of trans-coding to get it onto a player that almost certainly won't support that format. But again, it's an academic annoyance compared to the physical media format problem.

Only thing that remains is to get the process started. I can't wait to chuck the boxes of cassettes I have. I have my eye on my video tapes too. It's all part of my master plan. Not sure just yet what to do with my MDs. More on that later though.