Boring, stupid, nerdy tech stuff…

Posted on 07. Apr, 2015 by Tim Bushong in News

I love technology. There—I’ve said it. I’m with Kip in this regard, although he’s in a precarious position regarding La Fawnduh and his song, in which he declares his undying love for her—and for technology. No woman wants to be compared to an Acer… equivocate much?

Nonetheless, advances in technology make my work as a recording engineer a lot easier than is was, say, 15 years ago.

In the context of this post, I’m referring to the arduous task of backing-up sound data. Way back in the late 20^th century, audio back-up was done in *gasp* real time. Those of us who fondly remember the first advent of affordable digital recorders (the Alesis ADAT, and Tascam’s DA-88) also remember that in order to back-up your project you needed at least two machines, and after digitally connecting the two, you slapped a blank tape in the receiving machine, armed all the tracks, and hit ‘record’. The result was that an exact duplicate of the material was recorded. Pretty cool, huh? One problem—it took a lot of time.

With the next generation of digital audio, that being DAW’s (digital audio workstation) and computers, backing-up became a lot easier. The reliability of CD burners increased, and their price decreased, enabling back-up times to be based on the burn speed, rather than real-time transfers of data.

But, as 16-bit increased to 24-bit, and projects increased in size, DVD-back-up became the norm. I remember when I switched from CD’s, with a full 700 Mb of space (wow) to DVD’s, with their consumer-based product maxing out at around 4.7 gigs—nirvana!

Which brings me to my point: I had received an email a fews weeks ago from an old friend who wanted ‘drum-less’ tracks of something that had been recorded back in June of 2001. Most studios have an ‘expiration date’ for their clients’ data, but I just happen to be a bit exacting when it comes to backing up projects. I recall an article by Craig Anderton a while back where he was recommending that if you have projects where there were very specific parts that are being played by software synths, you should render those parts as .wav files, since it’s likely that you will eventually move to a different OS or even a different DAW, and won’t be able to access the synth or to reproduce the settings on it. Great advice, and it applies to DAW’s in general as well.

The 2001 project had been recorded in Logic 4.8 on Windows ME, which is by now about as obsolete as a floppy disc. Once the backed-up CD’s were located, I only had to load everything up on my system, which runs a newer version of Logic on Windows XP, and the songs all came up beautifully.

CD-R's at the ready, sir!

With the price of computing coming down, it usually makes sense to hang on to your old tower (rather than constantly changing out motherboards, CPU, and hard drives) just in case you need to have access to older projects. Another method is to render or bounce everything as continuous wav’s or aiff’s before backing-up, but that can be time-consuming.

NOT gonna be firing any of these up, though...

These days I no longer use DVD’s (let alone CD’s) for backing up files—I use a SATA docking station and swap out between a few 2-terabyte drives—just select and drag, baby!

Either way, I thought it was really cool that with very little fuss I could totally recall an old project and satisfy a client’s wishes.

Look, Ma—I'm backing up Tim's valuable data!

15 year's worth of DAT's, CD's, and DVD's.

Tags: engineer, Fort Wayne, Gear, Goshen, Indiana, mix, producer, recording, studio, Tim Bushong