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I have a neighbor who has this problem with bootleg audio cassettes. Concert recordings mostly. I keep begging him to back them up to digital and even gave him
by schwartzworld 2y ago
I have a neighbor who has this problem with bootleg audio cassettes. Concert recordings mostly. I keep begging him to back them up to digital and even gave him a little usb interface he could do it with.
He talks about this collection with such pride, it’s hard for me to imagine not future proofing at least your favorite ones, but there’s no convincing some people.
- stewx 2y agoTo be fair, hard drives are not necessarily more future-proof than audio cassettes. A hard drive typically lasts, what, 10 years, whereas a cassette tape is probably good for 50 years. You need to back up the digital copy onto different devices.
- yuvadam 2y agoA single hard drive can be part of a larger fault-tolerant storage cluster, not to mention much more easily duplicated and backed up. The digitization process is key.
- schwartzworld 2y agoOnce you have it digitized, making copies is trivial though. Every time you listen to a cassette the quality degrades slightly. You always run the risk of a machine eating a tape as well. Maybe the cassette will last 50 years in the box, but it won’t last 50 years of active use and you’ll want to make other copies, the earlier you make those digital masters the better.