Re: High resolution digital recorders


"Mike Rivers" <mrivers@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1192755185.453335.124590@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

On Oct 18, 8:11 pm, "Arny Krueger" <ar...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I have a number of pieces of CF sitting on a shelf in my store room.

One of the organizations I work with has perhaps 1,000 DAT tapes in
their store room.

Those are of course, historical artefacts.

Got that many CF cards?

Mike, there are so many flaws in your argument that I'd feel silly listing
them. ;-)

You've asked the wrong question.

The appropriate, professional question is:

"Would it be practical for an organization that in the past had collected an
archive of 1,000 DAT tapes, today switch over to using archiving CF cards
with the same work flow."

The answer seems to be yes switch to CF, because the costs of CF cards,
while greater than that of DAT tapes, has already dropped to the point where
switching from DAT media to CF media would not significantly add to project
costs.

Furthermore, when things like speed of access, reliability, and ease of use
are considered, there are valuable offsets associated with the use of CF as
opposed to DAT.

And do you have a label on each one so you can figure out what's recorded
on it?

Obviously, labelling CF cards is not rocket science. They still sell
sharpies! ;-)

Nobody's come up with a reasonable storage system for those memory card.

On the worst day of your life, put them in a small parts cabinet.

I've looked for one.

Think outside the box. ;-)

It may be preferable to offload CF to other media this week, because of
the
relative economics. However, the cost of CF has been falling at the
usual
rapid speed for solid state memory, or faster.

It doesn't matter how fast it has fallen, it's how much it costs at
the time you have to buy it. A 2 GB card would have to cost under $5
to be competive with DAT.

Not if you take a business view of the situation.

The relevant professional concept is total cost of ownership (TCO). Initial
cost of media is not the total cost of media. As I already pointed out,
today's ca. $10 cost difference between DAT and CF is usually vanishing
compared to total project cost. Then, there are the significant economic
benefits that I've already listed.

I predict that it won't get that low. When
it does, they'll stop making 2 GB cards and you'll have to buy a $10
or $15 card that will hold more material.

That's not what has happened so far with USB flash. What has happened is
that small sizes of USB CF have become a sort of jelly bean product that
people use indiscriminately. I've got 5 USB flash drives sitting on top of
this PC. I picked up two of them when I found them sitting in a client's
computer, and found that the person who owned the computer didn't know that
they were there, didn't know where they came from, or who they belonged to.

I provided the valuable technical service of removing a foriegn piece of
media with questionable contents from their PC! ;-)

Then you'll have more eggs
in a bigger basket, making it harder to find a particular recording -
not a good situation for a library.

That's all speculation, and speculation that is not supported by what we see
happening with similar media today.

The reason why I offload the files I record on CF is to edit them with a
PC. This has nothing to do with backup, even though a backup function is
accomplished at the same time.

Editing may happen some time with my recording, but not many of them,
and not necessarily any time soon. But they do need to be on some
medium that's easily playable for reference.

Given that many commodity PCs and printers come with CF readers built in,
and given that CF readers are cheap, readily available, and ubiquitous, CF
meets all of those requirements.

You can pull the CF out of most if not all of the digital recorders we've
been talking about, plug it into a PC, and copy standard audio files off in,
well in a flash!

Audio CDs are good for this.

They are slow, fragile, and bulky compared to CF. They also have a limited
size of only about 1/4 of a DAT tape as I recall. There's no way that Audio
CDs can replace DAT tapes like CF can.

A WAV file that requires a computer in order to listen to it is
less desirable.

Mike, you can't listen to your benchmark 2 hour .wav file with a standard
consumer player!

Scheduling that time is no biggie because it is not a lot of time. The
operation need not be attended except at the start, and sometime after
the
finish.

Didn't we go through this already?

Right. My answer was that professionals need to professionally determine
their needs, and make sure that they show up on the professional job site
with the professional resources they need. Amateurs should do that too. ;-)

If I have six cards at the end of
the day and need to clear them all off for the next day, I really
can't go very far from the computer.

If you have six cards that you need to clear off, and you don't have the
resources to manage the sitaution, then you're one piss poor excuse for a
professional, aren't you? ;-)

My solution is to have enough CF cards to do the whole job, with a good
safety margin. Thats what the professional photographers I work with do.

CF is way, way more
reliable than analog tape or DAT. DAT in particular could be a bit of a
crap shoot, especially for a long recording.

This has not been my experience. I have had problems playing DATs that
are 10 years or more old, but you don't know what will happen to a
flash memory card in 10 years, so you copy it to a CD and hope the CD
will play.

Or, leave it on the CF. Flash memory has been around since 1984, and AFAIK
data written on flash back in the late 1980s when it first became
commercial, is still there unless the media was disposed of.

IOW I think I've been copying 1 hour's worth of 16/44 recordings in 3
minutes or less.

Copy to what? Hard drive in the computer? And then what do you do with it?

I copy it to Edit it. Whenever time allows. I walk into the festival with
enough CF to hold the whole thing with a good safety margin. I do the same
thing with the other media I use. Does that make me unprofessional?
;-)

When the festival is over, I back up the whole project after editing to a
DVD and put it in the proverbial cool dry place. But that's just my work
flow. YMMV.

If I was so inclined, I'd just get more CF cards. They are already cheap
enough for even a cheapskate like me to just write and store.

I get paid enough for recording festivals that I can afford enough CF cards
to hold the entire encheleda on CF as long as I need to. Gosh, does that
mean that I'm a professional? ;-)

Put the computer on the shelf for the next 20 years? Of course
not! But say you wanted to copy the recording to an audio CD. You'd
need to put your 2 GB card's worth of audio on two CDs, or maybe three
if that made more sense to keep CDs coordinated with the program.

Mike, that sounds like more arguments to not use CD, even though you
previously recommended it. ;-)

I'm not very smart about making CDs. If I have a file that's too long
to go on one CD, I chop it up, save multiple files, then open the
files one at a time and burn the CD. That takes time - not so much
time that I can do something productive before I have to put in a new
CD, open a new file, and push the button again. That can easily tie me
up for a couple of hours. I don't care what you do, I DON'T WANT TO DO
THAT DURING A FESTIVAL (period).

See Mike, that's why I told you to get enough CF to do the whole festival,
with a good safety margin. ;-)

It's stupid to pay $300-1,000 for a good digital recorder and then choke up
at the idea of spending a few $100 for media to exploit it, no?

I see that eCost is selling 8GB USB flash for $69.95. Can CF be far behind?


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