The punch cards were found and converted. This is a much happier fate than that suffered by the original IRIG 14-track 1-inch tapes of the Apollo Moon Walk from 1969! I am currently digitizing 14-track 1-inch seismic tapes surrounding the Mount St. Helens eruption in 1980.

Many analog and digital formats are becoming harder to recover. David Crosthwait at DC Video lists many at-risk video formats that he can transfer. I was contacted today by someone wondering if I knew where to transfer QIC DC-600A data tapes. I said I did, and sent him to Chris Mueller who can transfer many formats including most QIC formats.

The point is, however, I don’t know how much longer all of this equipment will be workable. Ten years is pretty much a certainty. Fifty years is a very long time. Please, search your archives now for obsolete formats that still need to be converted. There are people who can still recover content from a wide variety of formats, but we and our equipment are all aging, as the Library of Congress pointed out. They had to repair the punch card readers before the Kennedy data could be captured. It’s getting more and more common to hear: if you want me to recover that data, first I have to restore the old player.

I have given up maintaining an 8-track cassette playback machine as the call wasn’t there. I sold it to another restorer, so let’s hope he will bring it back to life. Little by little, the less-widely used formats will fade away. My first 7-track 1/2-inch IRIG tape recovery in 2006 came to me after a long search in North America and Europe with no success. At that point, I did not own any real IRIG machines (I now own several). I used a modified audio recorder and a 1/4-inch 4-track instrumentation machine for the FM demodulation. So there are not many people capable of playing IRIG instrumentation tapes. I don’t think there are too many people able to recover 9-track data tapes.

Please, before it’s too late, bring your data into the 21st century. Be prepared to be told at some point in the future “it’s too late–no one can do it”. Another piece of luck was finding some old tape machines in someone’s garage for the recovery of the Lunar Orbiter images. They were almost lost. There are so many formats and all of them require dedicated hardware to recover the data.

The excitement is that the current version of LibreOffice has removed a good deal of the startup sluggishness. While still not as fast as MS Office 2003, remember with LibreOffice, you are starting the whole suite essentially. There is an option to load it at startup, which I do not use.

The LibreOffice word processor application won’t let you search on paragraph marks specifically, but does have an option for removing empty paragraph marks, so you can achieve the same end for when I search for ^p^p and replace with ^p in Word. The LibreOffice spreadsheet is very competent, as far as I have seen.

I have used Dia a bit for drawing and am thinking that it might just work for doing many of the drawings I do. There is also a scalable vector graphics (SVG) program called Inkscape that might do some of the things one might do in Adobe Illustrator. It also serves as a viable sketch pad for miscellaneous ideas. For some basic idea capture, it seems faster than Dia.

While on the subject of SVG graphics formats, Freemind is mind-mapping software written in Java. The boys have to do mind maps at school from time to time and none of us are all that good at it. Perhaps this software will help. It can export both SVG and PDF.

While I have current versions of Adobe Photoshop (CS5) and Lightroom (3), I cannot help myself from evaluating free alternatives as the number of computers here is growing and with both boys headed off to university (we hope) within 2.5 years, it would be good to select applications and allow them to become familiar with them. While Photoshop CS5 is a remarkable program, for quick adjustments and some very sophisticated lasso options (at least), Paint.NET is a great option. There seems to be a controversy between which is better, The GIMP or Paint.NET. Both applications have vocal adherents. I found The GIMP obtuse and difficult to learn. It was not intuitive to a PhotoShop user. On the other hand, I found Paint.NET extremely easy to adapt to. I haven’t yet done full-scale work in it, but it has real possibilities.

Paint.NET is an interesting story. It started as a thesis project in university. The initial goal was to use Microsoft’s .NET framework to create an improved version of the Paint program which comes with Windows. Paint.NET has gone way beyond the original Paint program (which I find generally useless) and while it is not Photoshop, it is small and fast and can do at least some of the things I used to start Photoshop for–and I can have it on every machine.

Paint.NET is one of the few programs discussed here that is Windows-specific. It requires the Microsoft .NET framework to function. Almost all of the other open source applications are available for Mac and Unix platforms as well as Windows.  I am certainly not one to say Windows is the only operating system. Since my primary money-making application, Samplitude, is Windows-only, that keeps me locked into Windows, as does almost 20 years of working in it.

While on the subject of Samplitude, I must say that after just receiving Version 11 (you can imagine the Spinal Tap humour that surrounds this version), I am impressed. The CD burning routines seem snappier, the high-quality MP3 generation is now much faster, and the new 6-band EQ is a joy to use. Samplitude has generous cross-grade and student pricing if you contact the U.S. rep, Tim Dolbear.

I cannot believe I have gone this far without mentioning two and a half really, really cool open source applications. These are the ones that made me believe that open source software could be just as good as the commercial product–maybe better. I’m talking about The Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox, Thunderbird, and Lightning.

Firefox has been my primary browser for probably four years now. It is wonderful. Internet Explorer 9 is also quite excellent, but I really like Firefox.

I had used Eudora since 1993 with my first Windows 3.1 computer, a 486 processor running at 66 MHz. Eudora was put out to pasture in about 2006, so by 2010 the lack of updates was annoying me and a few friends. I finally bit the bullet and transferred 17 years of email messages to Thunderbird. Mary Beth, our friend Marie-Lynn, and I are all using it. Marie-Lynn has not enjoyed the transition, but Mary Beth took to it immediately after using Outlook Express for several years. I love it. It’s not perfect, and I still think Eudora handled some things better, but, all-in-all, it’s an excellent program.

One of the more exciting features of Thunderbird is the ability to use the Lightning plug-in (the half-program mentioned above). This, along with the Provider for Google Calendar creates a competent and robust shared calendaring system. Mary Beth and I both share a single calendar and have it pop up right in Thunderbird. Multiple calendars are supported, but they complicate things a bit, so we’re leaving it as a single calendar that Mary Beth and I jointly maintain. The backup to Google Calendar is automatic and Google Calendar acts as the calendar server for both of our instances of Lightning within Thunderbird. The calendar is also accessible directly via Google Calendar from any web browser.

Finally, in the same vein, my son Robert and I are experimenting with Evernote. This is a note-taking application which backs up everything to the Evernote servers where it is accessible on the web. It will also synchronize multiple computers as I understand it. We are not too far into it, but in looking at OneNote in Office 2010 and Evernote, while Evernote is less richly featured, the built-in Web backup is powerful. Welcome to The Cloud!

Please email me any comments that you have about this series and unless you say “do not post” I will add them to the post, even though comments are generally disabled on this blog. I would also be interested in any thoughts on MD5 applications that can check a file on a regular basis against its hash file.

COMMENTS RECEIVED:

2011-03-01 I was contacted by Dave Myers dmyers (at) filegenius (dot) net about a product he is involved with called File Genius that is aimed at the professional architecture and engineering community as a collaborative tool and backup service. It is not precisely in the class of what I’m talking about here,  but for a larger, or enterprise, high-value environment it appears to be a choice to consider. I have never used it. Thanks, Dave, for the heads up.

While I generally write on audio subjects here, computers also interest me. I started using Microsoft Word in 1985 and continue to use it, 25 years later, and own several licenses to Office (2002, 2003, 2007, and 2010), but as the number of computers grows, I find that the other office suites are truly viable alternatives for Microsoft, at least for what I do. On complex documents, I try and compose them in the version that the client is using, but for simple documents, my current tool of choice is LibreOffice from The Document Foundation. It offers the same basic functionality as the OpenOffice suite, but it is a fork in the code and is being run by a non-profit foundation rather than as part of a commercial enterprise.

Using the open-source suite solves my problem of having the suite available on all my computers plus it solves the problem of having the home/student licensing level on a computer I want to use for a business project.

I still use an older version of Adobe InDesign and Microsoft Publisher, I am planning on trying out Scribus on my next page-layout project. Both Publisher and InDesign are high-end products (Microsoft seems to be pushing Publisher up-market in more recent versions of Office) and the cost for my infrequent applications is not warranted.

I have been looking for a Visio replacement. While not apparently compatible with Visio, Dia has received some good press. I am looking forward to trying it when I need to do diagramming.

Please let me know if there are other worthy applications competing with Dia and Scribus as I have yet to go far down the learning curve on either of these.

For utilities, I have some favourites that I keep using. Many of these are NOT free, but are well worth it in my opinion.

I have retired the high-priced spread in virus protection in favour of Microsoft Security Essentials which is FREE!

File backup and copy ViceVersaPro—I cannot say too many wonderful things about this program that I’ve been using for almost ten years.

File renaming AdvancedRenamer—This is a bit difficult to understand at first, but is a very powerful batch renamer with many different “methods” of renaming. This is donationware.

Making JPEG files for reference AdvancedConverter—This shareware program is excellent at making JPEGs from scanned TIF files. I use this to create a reference JPG file for each TIF file I create in scanning. However, it does not seem to do as well with NEF files from my D100, so I’ll need to figure out other ways of doing this for those folders that do not already have JPEGs. It can be done through Lightroom, Photoshop, and various Nikon applications, but for the TIF scans, this is really fast and does a very credible job.

I have recently found an excellent set of software calculators from Western Australia. This suite includes the widest-range unit conversion application I have seen to date (currently listing 758 units). It is part of the ESBCalc pro suite.

For ripping audio CDs, Exact Audio Copy is highly recommended.

For figuring out data network problems, I use Netscan from SoftPerfect.

For communicating with my Garmin GPS, I use G7ToWin.

Finally, I was sad to see that Chris Marriott is no longer updating his program SkyMap. The version I had would not run on a Windows 7 64 bit machine–but I bought it when I was using Win 3.1! Instead of buying the upgrade that is now several years old with no further upgrades promised, I found four fun free astronomy applications.

Stellarium—Perhaps the best all-around program for casual viewing of the sky. It’s real point of interest to me is it shows constellation art which suggests what the ancients might have seen in the stars. It helps me visualize the constellations better.

Cartes du Ciel (SkyChart)—Probably the closest to SkyMap though each has their good and bad points (and remember my experience is with an old version of SkyMap). This is a sophisticated mapping program with selectable star catalogs and more.

Celestia—While the above-two applications are mostly focused on Earth-bound observers, Celestia will have you flying all over the Universe! It is something you can spend a lot of time with.

Virtual Moon Atlas—This focuses just on the moon and provides a fascinating view in detail! I recall buying a paper Moon Atlas in the late 1960′s at a high-school book sale. This beats that (I still think I have that Moon Atlas).

I was reading some additional NAS discussion on a photography list serve and was introduced to yet another NAS vendor that deserves consideration, QNAP. They appear to have wide distribution in North America (I found two online retailers that list them, CDW.CA and CanadaComputers.com. While the comparison was made to the Drobo products in the discussion I saw, these products appear to be similar in pricing and quality to Thecus and Netgear and offer some interesting options. Thecus units are more difficult to obtain, but Netgear units are also available at the two online dealers listed for QNAP. Yet another name just came up in the discussion, Synology. QNAP, Synology, and Thecus are all headquartered in Taiwan, while Netgear is headquartered in the U.S.

My experiences–mostly positive–have been with Thecus and Netgear,  but I wanted to pass along QNAP as yet another contender. While Synology is also distributed by the two suppliers I listed above, it seems to be less in-depth than the QNAP and Netgear distribution, focusing on lower-end products at higher prices.

I currently own two Thecus N5200PRO 5-slot models and four Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ RND4000 units. My neighbour (with whom I share off-site backup) has just bought a pair of the ReadyNAS NV+ units. In all cases, one of each pair is in my home and the other is in my neighbour’s.

I would suggest professionally rated drives if you want to spring for them, but they tend to be 3x the price of the desktop drives. I’ve used mostly desktop drives and 1 TB and less seem to work fine. The 1.5 TB drives have been developing a few “reallocated sector” errors.

I provided some information for the listing of tape equalizations, and I find the compiled table (here) most useful.

Thanks to Kevin Bradley and the IASA team for their work in making this available. If you want a PDF copy, join IASA and it’s available.

The Lunar Orbiter tape digitization folks have just posted a commentary that bears reading by all archivists who are holding tapes. You may link to it here. The main site is www.moonviews.com

NASA, in their press conference yesterday held at The Newseum, admitted that the original 14-track 1-inch instrumentation (IRIG) tapes that contained the slow-scan video direct from the moon were most likely recycled and reused for later missions. Apparently, over 350,000 reels of instrumentation tape were recycled by NASA over time. No one apparently thought to preserve the 45-odd reels of the original moon walk.

The loss of the original IRIG tapes of the moonwalk is truly sad because this data could be re-converted to standard television formats using far superior methods than were available in 1969. There may be 2-inch helical Ampex VR-660 video tapes still extant of the slow-scan data,  but those have not surfaced. It appears that all surviving copies of the moonwalk videos are ones that had gone through optical standards converters. An optical standards converter is one that has a monitor displaying the image in real time in the transmitted standard and a television camera taking a picture of that monitor using the desired standard. Even the Australian Broadcasting Corp. tapes would have gone through this type of device, although they would be in PAL rather than the U.S.’s NTSC versions.

Lowry Digital is doing a great job of restoring what they have, but the Polaroid screen shot that survives of the slow-scan monitor is alluring of what could have been preserved. More information is available on the Parkes website and from NASA.

Vigilant migration of data as new storage techniques become available is the only way to assure long-term preservation. Even if the IRIG tapes are found, we are almost at the point where the tapes would be un-decipherable. I think one of my machines could play them (I say think as I’ve never tested it to full 500 kHz bandwidth), but I don’t have the specialized video decoder. NASA apparently preserved some equipment should the tapes ever show up.

This also raises another spectre. We MUST be selective as to what we keep in our archives because if we keep everything we won’t be able to afford it–or find it. This is one of the key jobs that archivists do. However, blindly following retention practices, as was done by NASA for the IRIG Apollo 11 tapes, needs to be tempered by historians as well. Certain small subsets of data (moonwalk slow scan video) are much more important than others (astronauts’ blood pressure and other biometrics throughout the entire flight).

All organizations who keep archives need to address this. In a generation (or less) if we save everything, it will become an overwhelming burden and the high points will be lost if they are not properly indexed.

As with much equipment–and especially with lower-cost equipment–the performance specifications and the actual operational data is not published. There are reports of the H2 clipping on the line inputs in some of the reviews and it appears that a lack of understanding how the inputs were configured exacerbated that situation.

There is nothing wrong with the line inputs on the H2. BUT there are some caveats:

1. DO NOT use the input level control on the line inputs to go below 100 or the preamps will clip before the signal reaches 0 dBFS.
   ALTERNATE WORDING (thanks Greg H.):
   Set Zoom H2 RECORD LEVEL to 100 or greater to avoid clipping at the Line In preamp stage.
2. Use an external attenuator with the gain set at 100 to avoid overdriving the line inputs.
3. The noise floor is not spectacular, but is not too bad. With the inputs terminated in 150 ohms, the peak noise was -70 dBFS, but that improved to about -85 dBFS or better, measuring it as an A-weighted rms figure, which is how most noise is measured. While this certainly isn’t what one would expect out of the Sound Devices, it is far better than the 50-60 dB(A) that one can achieve with an analog cassette tape without Dolby.
4. The maximum input level to the line input should be no more than -5 dBV or -3 dBu.
5. Try to avoid clipping as there appears to be a delayed recovery in some instances.

With this information, you can optimize a pad between the source and the H2 line input so that the recorder is never overloaded. Try to keep the levels as high as practical as there is a relatively limited dynamic range. On the other hand, I have found that the recorder noise is not objectionable even when I’ve boosted the levels 20 dB for a quiet choir piece from our church. The room ambience totally swamps the recorder noise–at least as far as I hear.

The H2′s internal mics are reasonably good for many purposes. While I still prefer the SD722 for many things, I think the H2 is one of the better oral history conversation capturing devices I’ve seen. It uses SDHC cards which may require a new card reader. Don’t use the built-in USB connection unless you’re recording MP3 files as you’ll be there all day. The internal card-reader mode is limited by the USB 1.1 interconnection. This interconnection is adequate, however, for using the H2 as a 16-bit live audio interface/microphone connected to your computer (at either 44.1 or 48 ks/s). The unit will record up to 96,000 samples per second, 24 bits,   but many of those bits will be noise.

Please let me know if this has helped or if you have any questions or comments.This work was done with version 1.50 of the H2 firmware.

Aurora Cable Internet (now part of Rogers) offers a 3 Mb/s symmetical cable modem service for SoHo clients, while Teksavvy offers a DSL service where you don’t have to deal with Bell tech support (even though the service is provided by Bell). Neither service is perfect. Teksavvy generally surfs the web faster while ACI/Rogers offers the faster upload speed (by about a factor of 4) for uploading large audio files to clients (either directly or via my hosting package servers with Hostgator (my preferred hosting provider for almost three years now) or 1and1 (an OK alternate)).

I have off-and-on had the two services and struggled with Dual-WAN routers. The Hawking H2BR4 worked reasonably well, but failover (as it always is with IP service) was messy and if I used load balancing mode some websites did not like the fact that some requests came from one IP address while others came from a second IP address for the same apparent session and the web pages loaded eratically.

When I upgraded to the SoHo cable service, I added a Netgear FVS124G Dual WAN router figuring that would be typical Netgear quality, but I (and reading some online reviews it appears others as well) were disappointed.

From the beginning, I also had a Netger FVS318 which I had used in California with my cable service and it worked and continues to work like a charm. I wish I could say the same for either Dual WAN router, especially the FVS124G.

For almost two years, I ran the cable modem via the FVS124G and the DSL modem via the FVS318. I had the FVS318 set to x.x.x.1 and the FVS124G set to x.x.x.2. In that way, depending on which gateway and DNS server I selected on each computer, I could easily control from the computer which service that computer used to access the Internet.

I was never sure if it was the cable service or the FVS124G causing intermittent problems with the cable service. I recently purchased an FVS318v3 and now have that on the DSL (which I consider primary for web surfing applications) and the old FVS318 is now on the cable service and the FVS124G is in a box. So far, so good, the cable service hasn’t worked better.

I think manual failover will also be easier. We do get multiple-hour outages from time-to-time on both services, so, since most of the computers are assigned to x.x.x.1, all I need to do is swap the LAN IP addresses between the two FVS318′s and change which one has DHCP activated (for the few items that use DHCP like the security system) and I can move all the primary Internet access from DSL to cable and back. If I need to do any uploads during that time, I would manually have to change the gateway and DNS addresses for the upload computer.

Connection-wise, this is simple, I just put a short LAN cable between the two FVS318s. If we ever get a fibre to the home system with really good throughput, I’m ready as the new FVS318 has a 10/100 WAN port while the old unit has only a 10 Mb/s WAN port.

I leave this set up so that there is one cable from the FVS-318 stack to the Gigabit Ethernet switch stack, so I can easily take everything (but the security system which plugs into the FVS318V3) offline should I so wish to do that.

Speaking of the switch stack, I have a 16-port GigE switch and a second 8-port GigE switch. I use the 8-port   switch for all my 100-BaseT devices. Since the uplink to this switch is GigE, it can’t saturate with 7 100 BaseT devices connected to it. The two smaller switches were cheaper than a 24-port GigE switch. Also, I really only have a half dozen or so items with GigE NICs. While the off-site backup NAS units do have GigE ports I’ve never bothered to update the media converters on the fibre to GigE as on most nights the 100 Base FX link only adds about a half hour or so of file transfer time and I don’t care as I’m sleeping while that happens.

If I need to have internet access during a meeting/seminar and I want to keep people off my main LAN, I can always break away the two FVS318s from each other and let the guests use the cable service with no ties to the DSL service or our NAS units.

As a final thought, the concept of two separate gateways/firewalls on the same network segment was the big gestalt to me when I realized I could just tell each computer which one to look at and I could swap which service was primary by just changing the gateway’s IP address, this all fell into place.

Unit #1 for client audio projects is a Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ with four 1500 GB drives, providing about 4.3 TiB of storage.

Unit #2 for personal projects and general data is a Thecus N5200 Pro with five 1000 GB drives, providing about 3.6 TiB of storage.

These two units are then duplicated off-site and connected by a fibre optic link (currently running at 100 Mb/s while the rest of the network is running at 1000 Mb/s).

After the Goderich tornado in 2011, I added a farther-offsite collection of 500 and 1000 GB 2.5-inch USB drives in a rugged steel case. Makes me even safer.

One of the reasons for the upgrade to the Thecus units for personal storage is that they can grow to 3.6 TiB [done in 2010] of storage with the addition of one 1000 GB drive to each. We are in the midst of a film scanning marathon that is seeing me scanning my Velvia slides to 36 MB files and my son scanning our family negatives to 18 MB files. We’re running the Nikon Coolscan 5000 ED in multiple shifts between the two of us. It was my son’s summer job.

With the addition of this storage and a subtle change in my storage model, I decided that it was time to re-think how the NAS units got loaded. I am still ingesting to a local hard drive; 750 GB for the main audio workstation and 250 GB for the photo workstation.

I use ViceVersa Pro from TGRMN and have loved it for many years. I use it to compare the work or release folders on the local machine with the target shares on the NASes. It then pushes the files that are older or non-existent on the NASes to both NASes. In the case of the audio workstation, it can push both client projects and personal projects to the two NASes and their off-site mirrors. We do NOT propagate deletes.

In order to avoid heat-soak of the RME Multiface AD/DA converters attached to the audio computer, I wanted to shut it down after a push session. Rather than just use ViceVersa’s scheduled run system and run the backup sometime when I am sleeping, I wanted to start the backup manually as soon as I was done and then have the machine shut down.

There is an undocumented command within Windows XP called “Shutdown”. Click on run and then enter “cmd” to open a DOS box. Type “Shutdown” (w/o the quotes) and hit enter. This will provide a list of parameters.

To shut down the computer enter
shutdown -s
To abort the shutdown enter
shutdown -a
And to change the default 30 second timeout to 60 seconds enter
shutdown -s -t 60

You can add a script for ViceVersa to run after it’s done, so I added the shutdown command to a batch file. I made this ViceVersa configuration an auto-run shortcut on my desktop. Right above it, I made another shortcut with shutdown’s abort command in it.

Now, when I’m done for the day, I can run the file pushout routines and still have the computer shut down as soon as it’s done–while I’m sleeping.

If you want to do off-site with NAS units but without the interconnection and the constant checking and alerting–in other words, you want a backup unit that just sits there off-site and is brought together with the main one every few weeks–then I would strongly suggest RAID-6 for both. This is the configuration I would suggest considering if you live in an area subject to major earthquakes and/or wildfires. It’s obvious that my California mentality hasn’t fully left me!

For “office” type work, all of the files reside on the local Thecus NAS. We run an update routine from our 24/7 Mail client PC to backup those documents nightly. The mail itself is pushed out as per the above model. Again, we do not propagate deletes.

A complete set of backups from local to off-site also run nightly on the photo computer, although that is not kept up every night. All this is done with ViceVersa Pro.

One of the neat things we do with ViceVersa is for JPG files in the images shares, we do not propagate changes from the local to the remote NAS. In that way, the image on the remote NAS is more like a “negative” for the family digital cameras that shoot JPGs. In that way, if one of my sons edits an image and wants the original back–and violates our rule that derivatives are renamed–we still have the original. I’d rather risk losing the derivative image than the original should the local NAS fail. We also do that with WAV files as we have had some minor modifications made to WAV file metadata with earlier versions of software. It does not seem to be an issue with the current software.

The general theory behind a checksum (or “Message Digest” = “MD”) is that it provides a unique 128-bit number for each and every file, based on its content. If one bit changes, the MD5 checksum (sometimes called “hash”) changes. The checksum is repeatable, does not permit discovery of two different files that produce the same checksum, and is non-reversible (i.e. you can’t create the content from the checksum).

Common practice in audio archiving is to use 128-bit checksums, although 160-bit checksums are available. The other common practice is to take the entire filename, including extension, and add a second “MD5″ extension to that. The *.*.md5 file contains the MD5 checksum plus generally the filename.

An alternate configuration is to create one file named checksums.md5 for the entire folder to save downloading effort.

While there are many options for creating MD5 checksums, for Windows, FastSum is a convenient and low-cost package.

At any point in the future, to verify your files, you create a new MD5 checksum and compare it to the ones that were created when the file was created. If they match, you know your file has not changed. The likelihood of both the original file and the checksum file changing so that they still appear valid is essentially nil.

Some applications, like D-Space, check the integrity of all the files in the system on a regular basis using MD5 checksums.

If you receive WAV files from me, more than likely, you will also receive MD5 checksums in the same package, be that on a DVD, hard drive, or via the Internet.

It only takes a minute to create these and it truly does offer peace of mind.

Oh, and the discussion started about images, but it pertains equally to audio and video. Ike was certainly clear on his thoughts about data tape. As I see it (without following it too closely), the marketplace is consolidating around LTO and appears to be shrinking, so maybe he’s right. I’ve stayed away from data tape in favour of an all-disk solution (for approximately 3 TB of storage at the moment).

When looking at storage for audio, consider a track-hour (i.e. a mono program) at 96,000 samples per second, 24 bits, is about 1 GB, uncompressed. 1 TB is about 1,000 track-hours of material at the normal high-resolution sample rate and bit depth…and that currently fits on one physical drive.

The recent experience: A client project generated about 70 GB of files so hard-drive delivery made sense–especially since I had two gently used Western Digital Passport 80 GB drives sitting on the shelf. There would be no infant mortality here. The client (on one continent) and the producer (on another continent) were both to receive copies. I shipped them off and the producer (on the same continent as I) received his copy first and mentioned to the client he couldn’t read it on his Mac. The client had told me he was sure that the Mac would read NTFS, so based on my conversation with Eric, I decided, with client approval, to send NTFS. A few days later, the client received his copy and is pleased with the files and was able to open them without a hitch on his Mac.

As of this writing, the issue of the producer’s disk is still up in the air. I have offered to take it back, reformat it as FAT32, reload the files with MD5 checksums, verify the checksums, and return the drive to him. I think the producer is looking for a Mac utility that will permit reading the disk as-is. I hope so, less work here, but still I’m willing to undertake this to maintain client satisfaction.

In the meantime, I was searching for an easy way to format a drive larger than 32 GB in FAT32 which is locked out by design in Windows XP. It turns out that there is a DOS-box utility, FAT32FORMAT, that works like a charm. If the drives are combo USB/FireWire, using the Sound Devices 722 to format them would be a choice, but for USB-only drives, that is not an available option. PLEASE be careful as this utility will destroy all data on the disk. Use it with care.

After posting the above, the producer gave up trying to read the disk. I reformatted it FAT32, reloaded it, sent it back to him and he was happy.

The cost savings in using bargain-basement digital speech recorders are offset by the labour required to reformat these files upon their receipt by an archive and also the fidelity of the recording suffers, and with fidelity, intelligibility also suffers.

DSS was an industry standard agreed upon by Olympus, Grundig, and Philips in 1994. Like the compact cassette and the micro cassette, this format was developed for dictation. My perspective is that oral history is more than dictation, although the DSS format claims no loss when compressing a WAV file. It includes nuances and other cues that are often lost in the dictation-only environment. My personal preference is for stereo recording of oral histories, but that is certainly not universally accepted.

While Olympus claims that DSS offers future-proof access to recordings, it becomes another standard that must be maintained and should converters become unavailable for new platforms, then the entire archive will need to be reformatted at that point.

The oral history resources I have listed here are generally looking at archiving WAV files. CD-quality WAV files should be more than adequate for oral histories, but that is a far different quality level from DSS.

There are a variety of software packages that will convert from DSS to WAV files. Switch (a great free utility) will convert SP mode, unprotected DSS files and a host of other file formats to WAV (and MP3). Olympus has a player as well.

The decision to archive in WAV or MP3 is tough. While concatenation of compression (stringing two compression cycles together, end-to-end) is considered poor form, if the MP3 file is not too heavily compressed, then there is saving vs. archiving in WAV if the program material originated in another compressed format. Tests with program material and critical listening should be undertaken prior to accepting this. If the decoded DSS or other compressed file is stored as a WAV file, then nothing is lost. The amount lost with (for example) a well-compressed 96 kb/s mono MP3 file at 44.1 ks/s will be low.

Archiving WMA files is another question. As long as Windows Media Player is available, these files should be playable. I’m not sure about the cross-platform compatibility of these files, so that is a negative at the start.

The best suggestion is to archive as few different formats going forward as possible, and then make sure at each major upgrade of software that these files will all be accessible.

A comment:

Your readers may also be interested in the Acappella Conference Audio Recorder and Playback Assistant which improves the reliability of transcripts and the time taken to produce them by recording in CD quality audio and telling the typist during transcription the name of the person speaking.

http://www.acappella.com.au

http://audiorecorder.wordpress.com

[Blogowner\'s comments: This was posted by someone who appears affiliated with the company. We have no experience positive or negative with this system. It appears capable and I released the comment to the blog but am adding this note that this is not an endorsement, but you should review it as a possibility and see if it meets your needs.]

What I use is shown on my facility page. That\’s one of the main reasons it is there. If I’m using it, it’s because I like it or it solves a problem for me. If I’m not using it, either I don’t have an opinion about it, won’t spring for it, or don’t like it.

It seems the good stand-alone CD recorders (like the Sony CDR-W33) are going out of production. Your best bet is to use a computer. Please consider a good USB/1394 audio interface and a good audio editing program.

Pro Tools is a good program, but I think Samplitude (which I use) offers more bang for the buck and is very, very clean sounding. Many musicians that I know use the Steinberg lineup of software. Adobe Audition (the former Cool Edit) is also widely used.

Browsing all the topics in this section, reviewing the Formats & Resources section, and looking at my facility page  should give you a good idea of where to start and why.

I’d be happy to answer any questions submitted via email. Some may be answered here, so please let me know if you wish to remain anonymous or quoted by name/email/website.

What is described in this article is obsolete in a large part. Please see the Data Storage category for current thinking.

For those of us who are working at a much smaller scale, I have provided references on what I do for fairly robust storage on a budget. Please see these two attachments: description and map. It shows a unified (I hope) approach useful to small archives and businesses.

On March 12, 2006, Chris Goosman asked:

What does it take to point the family logins to the centralized \”My Documents\”? Does each user get their own \”My Documents\” folder or is it truly a central space that all users share?

Your page has inspired me to write up a similar document for the home/studio/office network here including my backup strategy.

I currently use a backup server with 750GB of Raid-5 running Retrospect, but I need a longer term archive storage and I found one of those LaCie NAS boxes like you use (the local one, with the 10/100 and firewire interfaces, not the newer one with gigabit and USB 2.0) for a great price and it\’s on the way. I will be trying out ViceVersa which looks neat.

For the network, is your Netgear switch a layer 2 switch? I think I\’ll be moving toward a layer 2 switch to handle a few different VLANs. I\’m using Vonage for my own voice service which I\’d like on it\’s own VLAN, plus my wifes office computers on their own VLAN, my studio on a VLAN, and then soon I plan on putting together an Astrisk PBX and would want it on it\’s own VLAN. But this is too much computer geek talk and not enough audio geek talk, so I\’ll stop now.

I replied:

Hi, Chris,

Each \”My Documents\” is a separate \”My Documents\” folder in each user\’s own logon – as is a \”Favorites\” which includes \”Links\” so no matter where you log in your IE looks the same. I move: \”Favorites\” and \”My Pictures\” and \”Desktop\” into the root of \”My Documents\” so they\’re visible. Also move \”Music\” and \”Videos\”. I use Microsoft\’s TWEAK UI PowerToy http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx to do this.

My hierarchy is root/family/person

That way, I can back up root/family and get everyone. I also have set permissions so my wife and I can see everyone\’s space. My wife is worried about deleting stuff, so I made mine read only to her.

I am not using any managed switches, and don\’t intend to go VOIP in the near future, but Skype may be in my future for long calls. The only thing I have (that I\’m not using) that is at all fancy is the Netgear FVS-318 firewall which also has VPN capabilities, but I don\’t have a VPN client installed (and yes, I know VLAN and VPN are different things).

Since I currently have dual firewalls \”in series\”, my kids\’ laptops when they get them (years) will be connected between the two firewalls and I\’ll have a small NAS box at that point to house their documents, and then pull it across the firewall with VVPro.

This supports my contention that Firewire (IEEE 1394) and USB 2.0 are the preferred methods for connecting high-quality, high-resolution audio interfaces to computers.

While I have two RME Multifaces (the original, not the Multiface IIs shown in the link) that use dedicated PCI cards, this means that if I purchase a new computer with a PCI Express interface, I’ll have to purchase two new PCI Express interface cards for the RME Multifaces — and hope that RME makes it at the time I need it. Many users have expressed satisfaction with their Digital Audio Labs CardDeluxe.

This sounds a lot like the Zefiro Acoustics ZA-2  ISA card that is languishing in a Dell Dimension XPS PII 333 MHz machine.

My recent foray into an audio interface via IEEE 1394 was the MOTU 828 MK II. So far, I am happy and it’s finding uses in the studio as well as the remote notebook-centric applications I originally acquired it for.

I would think that a good audio interface might last longer than a good PC, so consider this approach.

What is easier to use than ready-made BLOG software, so I guess Richard is finally Blogging!

I hope you like this and find it of interest. Please let me know of any changes or topics you might like addressed.

Enjoy!

Note: This post has been put in every top-level category because it appears that a post is needed in each top-level category if the sub-categories are to be visible.

Note 2: The Tips  & Notes blog and the  Formats & Resources  static pages of this  sub-site replace the Tips and Resources static pages on the Web site. And, there is integrated searching across both the blog articles and the static pages.