[BC] Digital Storage

[Alex Hartman]

Just saying though, 2Tb disks, while they hold a lot of data, i wouldn't trust them in anything short of any type of commercial hardware RAID controller, and have a bajillion spindles. Expecting a single drive (or a few USB drives) to hold all your stations automation music without any backup is silly.

I think we did the math once for our "archive" to be digitized. IIRC, it was somewhere in the neighborhood of 100Tb, and a bunch of years just to actually "rip" the discs and vinyl dubs.  Which, today, really isn't a whole lot of storage. And we obviously don't play EVERY cut from a CD, some have swearing, some just suck, others are 10 minutes of silence to find that "hidden track". (or 93 negative 1-second tracks, talk about annoying!) The real hard part for us to move to a digitized medium is liner notes. All our music is hand reviewed for history and "good cuts". We're college after all, if it's been in the top 40 market EVER, we don't play it. We play B-Sides, but you'll never hear us play something by ke$ha or anything like that. (With a few exceptions, we played alice's resturaunt at the top of every hour on thanksgiving...)

And to the point that we're a college station, i'm pretty sure we have a LOT of one-off CDs and demos from bands nobody's ever heard of, including in-studio cuts. Finding a replacement for a good 30% of our music is actually impossible. We have demo discs from Johnny Lang before he was a signed artist, and when he toured locally. We have a BUNCH of in-studio recordings from a fair number of now-well-known acts, but these were before they were anybody. All mastered on ADAT and stereo tracks on DAT or Reel...

Most of those however have been moved to DVD or CD for storage and long-term archives, but very little will ever get put into automation. Believe me, if i was doing it, the music folk would be ripping the tracks they like (rotation and recurrents) into automation 10 years ago, but the station manager is an old school player. Hell, we used to shut down the transmitter if there wasn't a warm body behind the mic! Finally got that stopped with a lot of pressure and a number of years. :)

We have our first satellite receiver in the stations 40 year history... and we only use it for overnights. :)

--
Alex Hartman

On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 11:51 AM, Scott Bailey <wmroradio at bellsouth.net> wrote:
>Alex,

>Most consumer grade stuff has come up with professional grade stuff these days.
>It's just as reliable. All it is that your going to pay more money in the end
>buying pro stuff, which is funny, Saturday at Best Buys, I was seeing all the
>pro stuff used in Digital Audio. The internet has changed our lives forever.
>You're being like my mother and she wants to live in the past. You don't see
>us using Tube Type Radios in our cars anymore. That's been gone for over 40+
>years.  Just about all the Commercial Stations use Solid State Transmitters, and
>let the hams play with the old tube transmitters. 

>The original masters of recordings are held by the music industry. If you need a
>song, you can go to itunes,napster,etc, and buy the songs. Heck for the the
>commercial broadcasters, there is now a site of current and recurrent music that
>we can download for free, because we are a licensed broadcast station, and we
>pay BMI, ASCAP, and SESAC.  Keep an old 45 and using it on the air is silly,
>clutter up the audio with noise that sounds like a bacon frying contest. Get
>real, and OUT of the past.

>There are collectors of those old 45's & 33 1/3 albums, but now that's just a
>"home hobby" not to be used in the professional word. The world is changing so
>fast that I have a problem keeping up with it.  The next thing we'll hear is
>that your going to show your students how it was done in the 20's and 30's with
>them old 78's!  I've never owned a 78 RPM Record in my lifetime, and I'm nearly
>50 years old.
> Scott Bailey
>WMRO-AM, Gallatin, TN

>----- Original Message ----
>> From: Alex Hartman <goober at goobe.net>
>>
>> While consumer disk space is cheap, i wouldn't trust consumer grade drives to
>>last much more than 5 years these days. Enterprise level drives about the same
>>if they're running 24/7 but if you stick them in external cases and use them
>>sparingly, they'll last virtually forever.
>>
>> Remember, things purchased at the same time, put into service at the same time,
>>will FAIL at roughly the same time.
>>
>> SSDs aren't proven yet either, so don't go that route. Honestly, the only good
>>"backup" solution i've found for audio really is keep the original handy.
>>