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I mean, I did a bunch of remastering back in the day — generally old stuff being re-released on new media. It was always from the finished original mixes (or c
by rectang 5y ago
I mean, I did a bunch of remastering back in the day — generally old stuff being re-released on new media. It was always from the finished original mixes (or copies if using the originals was impractical).
There's a vast quantity of stuff out there getting remastered constantly through the ages. For vinyl, for cassette, for CD, for streaming, for whatever. Or multiple times for the same medium, because the old masters wore out, were damaged or lost... And sure, sometimes remastering is done for aesthetic reasons, but it's not common.
I guess if you're going to limit your definition of "remastered" to "the stuff that gets marketed as 'remastered'" then there are going to be more releases in there where remixing was done.
But remixing (unless the goal is DJ-style remixing) is difficult, because reproducing the original mix environment is a huge challenge. In theory it's become more feasible in recent years if the mixing is done totally inside a DAW, but it's still hard to guarantee that the system can be rebooted (so people save "stems"). Long-term archival is a hard problem, even if your goal is just to preserve linear PCM sound files!