AES PNW Chapter and the Future of Archivals and Deliverables
I attended the AES PNW chapter meeting last night at Glenn Sound where I was both surprised and calmed to learn the likely future of our industry in regards to both digital archival as well as, primarily, acceptable means of delivery of finished audio to labels.
Independent and label-driven recordists worldwide are by and large done taking part in the proprietary battles, with the exception of a couple of late hangers-on. The battle has been that engineers everywhere are/were backing up and handing off music in so many different proprietary and/or short-lived (to now obsolete) forms that it’s become the challenge of the industry and its people to take upon itself finding a backup and deliverables means to use going forward that will have a longer shelf-life than, say, two years.
In the analog days all you had to do was dig out your session notes and track sheets and it was all right there. Now, because of various archival shortcomings and unforeseen disappearances of formats and companies, AES and the industry are recognizing the growing difficulty of documenting those types of notes as functional and understandable metadata, as well as finding a file format or formats that will be around for a while in addition to being ultra-reliable in terms of data recovery.
What’s important to recognize is that Fortune 500 companies, not audiophiles (believe it or not), are the ones driving the data and archival industries. The bigger you are, the louder your dollars speak. Thus, it becomes important for us to take note of what formats their deliverables are being dumped onto, and what archival means they are using.
In short, three formats currently rise to the top of the list in regards to Fortune 500 archival. They are DLT, AIT, and LTO. We’re talking big business, government, hospitals, and very important data that needs, legally, to be reliably retrievable for a number of years (in terms of media shelf life).
Essentially, we need to corroborate our efforts and find something with the long-term industry stability that analog has/had… and it’s time to start having those discussions now.
So, although this is just the beginning and we certainly didn’t finalize any industry standards last night, we all need to keep an eye out for these big industry changes, because they will affect us all, all the way from the musician’s pocketbook to the mastering house and beyond.
-Matt Redmon, Product Specialist
