Dear Roger,

Thank you for your website and all of the amazing, and invaluable, work
you've done over the years.

I'm soft of an upstart, guerilla-style record producer, based in Columbus,
OH, and I have one tape storage question that I didn't find addressed on
your extremely informative Digital Atomics website:

What if you have a stack of valuable ADAT masters just sitting there in
plastic slipcovers--thus far relatively safe and sound (?)--on a bookshelf
at home (away from magnetic fields and excessive heat, cold or moisture,
etc.) and you are simply afraid that Y2K-related service interruptions could
plunge you into freezing-cold temperatures for indefinite periods, and that
there might be somewhat rapid fluctuation in temperatures if the problems
are intermittent?

Sadly, I don't have any real money to throw at the problem, and I see little
reason to believe that most other storage facilities won't experience some
of the same sort of problems, as well.

Could you be kind enough to offer any sort of advice at all?
Any piece of pertinent ADAT-storage information would be very much
appreciated.

Phillip Park


Phillip

ADAT masters are tape, and tape of any kind deteriorates over time. On a shelf in your house is a much better place than a shelf in your garage, attic, or basement. The relative climate changes are small compared to the other three locations. The worst news is that you are actually dealing with video tape. The rotating heads lay down fine helical tracks that contain the digital audio data. The physical dimensions of the tape change slightly over time but are magnified by the microscopic size of the helical scan track on the tape. The only way you can improve your storage would be a complete climate controlled room, but the difference in length of storage will not make much of a difference over your lifetime.

If you really want to be able to play back these tapes ten or twenty years from now and be 100% sure everything will be there, then I would transfer everything digitally to another format. I personally have been transferring my ADAT tapes into Pro Tools and then burning CD-ROMs of the audio files for long term storage. Each CD-ROM will store about 15 minutes of 8 tracks of audio. If the material is longer, or the tracks more numerous, then spread it over multiple CD-ROMs. Blank CDs cost less than $1 each, so look at all the money you save by freeing up the ADAT tapes for another project. Or use the blank tapes to barter for the transfers. If you were using a BRC and syncing the ADATs to time code, then use the same time code to lock up Pro Tools for the transfer.

If in 50 years there is no Pro Tools, there will be something that will read the Sound Designer file format to retreive the data. I hope this answers your question.

Roger Nichols

[This message has been edited by Roger Nichols (edited 01-04-2000).]