4 ms·

I understand your point, but what good are master tapes if they're not available to be heard? I think you could argue that destroying a musical distribution net

I understand your point, but what good are master tapes if they're not available to be heard? I think you could argue that destroying a musical distribution network has the same effect as destroying music: it's no longer available to be consumed.

xoa 7y ago
>I understand your point, but what good are master tapes if they're not available to be heard? But they might be. The article itself gave examples of music long ignored that was rediscovered and became of interest, at which point the company could go to its archive and digitize the masters again with the latest tech. They did keep it archived in the first place for a reason after all. Alternatively with advancing tech and changing management the time may come when they'd be able to and decide to floor-perfectly digitize it all. Or down the road the public zeitgeist might change and support requiring the above. Whether or not they were private, they at least represented potential, real and significant potential. Just like the Brazil museum that burned, or so many other sad losses. Having that potential destroyed forever can be rued even if it's not fully certain it'd be realized can't it?
- iicc 7y ago
  >music long ignored that was rediscovered and became of interest, at which point the company could go to its archive and digitize the masters again with the latest tech. For anyone interested check out the part-isolated "mogg" files from the Rockband games.
  - LocalH 7y ago
    Harmonix doesn't really like people getting those stems out of the games, though (it can affect their ability to license music going forward). I'm part of the GH community, and when RB4 was ripped, HMX got pissed. Admittedly, the people downloading the rips largely didn't care about analyzing the music, they just wanted to play RB4 songs for free, so I totally understand why they'd be pissed. They care far less about the stems they put out in the pre-RB days, in GH1/2/80s. But they were mostly covers in the first place (except for the bonus songs, and a small handful of main setlist songs).
bogomipz 7y ago
>"I understand your point, but what good are master tapes if they're not available to be heard?" Because they are they are the source for the products that music fans by. Remixes, re-issues, box sets and alternate takes all come from master tapes. Without the masters none of these things are possible. You are in fact "hearing" those master tapes just a copy of them. It's an incredibly privileged few who are able to sit and listen to the original 24 track 2 inch reels in a recording studio. VH1's show "Classic Albums" show often does with the artist and producer/engineer as the format of their TV show. It's worth watching for this aspect alone. There is a great example of why this is important in the article regarding the 50th Anniversary release of The Beatles's Sargent Peppers. These things would not be possible without the master tapes. The first generation of CDs in the 1980s are laughably bad fidelity. Now imagine the masters for many recording disappeared after those horrible fist early 1980s releases. Those terrible CD versions would be our source of everything going forward.
mrbbk 7y ago
Mastertapes contain the music precisely as recorded by the artist themselves. They're not meant to be listened to or consumed actively -- they're there to serve as indelible recordings and references. Scholarly work on Jazz, for example, relies extensively on the existence of master tapes. Here's why: When you record music to a multitrack magnetic tape like most of the recordings in this vault, you then get the ability during playback, for example, to fade individual tracks in and out. This would allow you to, e.g. isolate the sound of just McCoy Tyner's piano track on a classic Coltrane recording. Hearing his playing on it's own, without the rest of the band, could allow a music researcher to hear notes and sounds that might be masked by the final product recording, which flattens the recording. One way of understanding this issue, which might appeal to the HN audience, is this: The process of "flattening" tracks to make the final sound recordings that we end up hearing as consumers is a lossy form of compression, even if the sound file format you consume it in is described as "lossless."
- illwrks 7y ago
  Source code vs compiled or layered Photoshop file vs flat JPEG.
- magduf 7y ago
  That's all well and good, but the problem with this obsession with master tapes is that they don't last forever, and degrade over time, along with every time they're taken out and handled and run through a player to create another "remaster" that has no dynamic range and lots of clipping distortion, since that's apparently what consumers want these days.
iicc 7y ago
It's the difference between not available now, and, destroyed for all eternity.

xoa 7y ago

>I understand your point, but what good are master tapes if they're not available to be heard? But they might be. The article itself gave examples of music long ignored that was rediscovered and became of interest, at which point the company could go to its archive and digitize the masters again with the latest tech. They did keep it archived in the first place for a reason after all. Alternatively with advancing tech and changing management the time may come when they'd be able to and decide to floor-perfectly digitize it all. Or down the road the public zeitgeist might change and support requiring the above. Whether or not they were private, they at least represented potential, real and significant potential. Just like the Brazil museum that burned, or so many other sad losses. Having that potential destroyed forever can be rued even if it's not fully certain it'd be realized can't it?

iicc 7y ago
>music long ignored that was rediscovered and became of interest, at which point the company could go to its archive and digitize the masters again with the latest tech. For anyone interested check out the part-isolated "mogg" files from the Rockband games.
- LocalH 7y ago
  Harmonix doesn't really like people getting those stems out of the games, though (it can affect their ability to license music going forward). I'm part of the GH community, and when RB4 was ripped, HMX got pissed. Admittedly, the people downloading the rips largely didn't care about analyzing the music, they just wanted to play RB4 songs for free, so I totally understand why they'd be pissed. They care far less about the stems they put out in the pre-RB days, in GH1/2/80s. But they were mostly covers in the first place (except for the bonus songs, and a small handful of main setlist songs).

bogomipz 7y ago

>"I understand your point, but what good are master tapes if they're not available to be heard?" Because they are they are the source for the products that music fans by. Remixes, re-issues, box sets and alternate takes all come from master tapes. Without the masters none of these things are possible. You are in fact "hearing" those master tapes just a copy of them. It's an incredibly privileged few who are able to sit and listen to the original 24 track 2 inch reels in a recording studio. VH1's show "Classic Albums" show often does with the artist and producer/engineer as the format of their TV show. It's worth watching for this aspect alone. There is a great example of why this is important in the article regarding the 50th Anniversary release of The Beatles's Sargent Peppers. These things would not be possible without the master tapes. The first generation of CDs in the 1980s are laughably bad fidelity. Now imagine the masters for many recording disappeared after those horrible fist early 1980s releases. Those terrible CD versions would be our source of everything going forward.

mrbbk 7y ago

Mastertapes contain the music precisely as recorded by the artist themselves. They're not meant to be listened to or consumed actively -- they're there to serve as indelible recordings and references. Scholarly work on Jazz, for example, relies extensively on the existence of master tapes. Here's why: When you record music to a multitrack magnetic tape like most of the recordings in this vault, you then get the ability during playback, for example, to fade individual tracks in and out. This would allow you to, e.g. isolate the sound of just McCoy Tyner's piano track on a classic Coltrane recording. Hearing his playing on it's own, without the rest of the band, could allow a music researcher to hear notes and sounds that might be masked by the final product recording, which flattens the recording. One way of understanding this issue, which might appeal to the HN audience, is this: The process of "flattening" tracks to make the final sound recordings that we end up hearing as consumers is a lossy form of compression, even if the sound file format you consume it in is described as "lossless."

illwrks 7y ago
Source code vs compiled or layered Photoshop file vs flat JPEG.
magduf 7y ago
That's all well and good, but the problem with this obsession with master tapes is that they don't last forever, and degrade over time, along with every time they're taken out and handled and run through a player to create another "remaster" that has no dynamic range and lots of clipping distortion, since that's apparently what consumers want these days.

iicc 7y ago

It's the difference between not available now, and, destroyed for all eternity.