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With most music production being done these days with software which writes to closed, proprietary formats, many multi-track masters will no longer be usable in
by rectang 8y ago
With most music production being done these days with software which writes to closed, proprietary formats, many multi-track masters will no longer be usable in the future even if the digital archives survive. Once the vendor drops support (as is happening in a different space with Flash), actually firing up a working system becomes an increasingly difficult challenge as the years advance.
- dspig 8y agoIt's pretty normal these days to keep at least submix stems if not each individual track as plain audio files, not only for future-proofing but for shifting to other software to do the mixing or mastering. Admittedly any processing not burnt into the tracks is lost but that was true of analog multitracks too.
- bigiain 8y agoI wonder if in the future we'll have the equivalent of 2019 Javascript transpiled versions of ProTools/Cubase/GarageBand/Ableton/Reason/whatever, all running in whatever the future equivalent of "the browser" is?
- vonseel 8y agoAIFF and Wav are proprietary digital formats????? AFAIK every modern DAW saves its audio files to AIFF and WAV somewhere inside the project folder. Granted, this does not include MIDI tracks that have not been rendered, so if you don’t want to lose the sound of those tracks and any virtual instruments you are using, better render the MIDI tracks when finishing the project. The only downside to all of this is that raw multi-track files in a project don’t include any additional processing or edits (depending on DAW), but that’s what stems are for. It would be good practice to render every single track to equal-length WAV files when completing the final mix.