Topic: Saving Raw Masters

[bhadella]

I burn my master waves, 24 bit and 16 bit flacs to dvd.   I keep one set of both the 24 bit and 16 bit flacs in my music folders/hard drives to listen to thru my playback.  I keep a backup copy of my music (albums, downloads and my recordings) offsite. 

[Brian Skalinder]

I wish there was, and maybe there is, a way to save the changes to an audio file in a non-destructive way.

FWIW, Samplitude does.

[Gordon]

I burn 16bit, 24bit, & untracked flacs to dvd (all quality TY disc).  16 and 24 bit flacs are also backed up to at least two externals harddrives (kept in fire and h20 proof safe) in addition to the internals where I use them for the squeezebox.  I too am thinking about dropping the burning of the untracked files.  I have never gone back and needed them.  for shows that I was the only taper I think I should keep them but once I seed the 16&24 bit flacs so they are out there without errors then it's starting to seem pointless keep the raw files.

[junkyardt]

all i save are my 24 bit tracked flacs. the rest seeded and then deleted. raw files get deleted

it's a free country so do whatever you want of course, but just in case anyone else sees this post and thinks that your approach is wise...deleting everything but tracked FLACs seems like a risky and borderline boneheaded approach that would not be recommended by many. what if you ever want to go back and remaster the full show? then you have to piece it back together or do it track by track. what if the FLACs get corrupted somehow in a way that a WAV wouldn't be? seems like that is a strategy bound to bite you in the ass someday.

[Gordon]

see my post above.  been taping with mics since 2003 and have NEVER had to go back to my raw files.  I still have them though but am thinking about not keeping them anymore.

[halleyscomet8]

all i save are my 24 bit tracked flacs. the rest seeded and then deleted. raw files get deleted

it's a free country so do whatever you want of course, but just in case anyone else sees this post and thinks that your approach is wise...deleting everything but tracked FLACs seems like a risky and borderline boneheaded approach that would not be recommended by many. what if you ever want to go back and remaster the full show? then you have to piece it back together or do it track by track. what if the FLACs get corrupted somehow in a way that a WAV wouldn't be? seems like that is a strategy bound to bite you in the ass someday.

if i lose it all, i lose it all i am really not that worried about it. i may go back and listen to maybe 20% of my recordings more than once or twice. there will always be more music to collect down the road.

[it-goes-to-eleven]

if i lose it all, i lose it all i am really not that worried about it. i may go back and listen to maybe 20% of my recordings more than once or twice. there will always be more music to collect down the road.

Yeah, and performers die.  Sometimes there is only one recording of their last performance, or none.  Stuff like that.

Most of my masters are 24/96.  I don't consider the 16/44 versions to be the 'be all, end all'.  So preserving the originals is important, to me.

[stevetoney]

How often do people actually have issues unpacking FLACs?  I've mentioned earlier that I had issues, but that ended up being due to corrupt media discs.  Otherwise I've never personally had an issue with the actual FLAC file unpacking.  I'm not saying it's not an issue though...I'm asking if this has happened to people. 

For those that this may have happened to, do you double-check the integrity of your FLACs with your MD5 or FFP immediately after you create them to ensure the FLACs were properly built?

[page]

How often do people actually have issues unpacking FLACs?  I've mentioned earlier that I had issues, but that ended up being due to corrupt media discs.  Otherwise I've never personally had an issue with the actual FLAC file unpacking.  I'm not saying it's not an issue though...I'm asking if this has happened to people. 

For those that this may have happened to, do you double-check the integrity of your FLACs with your MD5 or FFP immediately after you create them to ensure the FLACs were properly built?

had one of my masters sit on an hdd once and it wouldn't decode after about 2 years. I ended up figuring out where the bad sector was, decoding up till that point and I lost the last 15 minutes of the show (which had the best song... bah).

I verify all flacs upon creation, mine was something went wrong on the drive over time.

[stevetoney]

How often do people actually have issues unpacking FLACs?  I've mentioned earlier that I had issues, but that ended up being due to corrupt media discs.  Otherwise I've never personally had an issue with the actual FLAC file unpacking.  I'm not saying it's not an issue though...I'm asking if this has happened to people. 

For those that this may have happened to, do you double-check the integrity of your FLACs with your MD5 or FFP immediately after you create them to ensure the FLACs were properly built?

had one of my masters sit on an hdd once and it wouldn't decode after about 2 years. I ended up figuring out where the bad sector was, decoding up till that point and I lost the last 15 minutes of the show (which had the best song... bah).

I verify all flacs upon creation, mine was something went wrong on the drive over time.

Right.  Again bad media...in this case bad sectors on your harddrive.  I'm thinking that having redundancy addresses that concern as long as you verify that the FLACs were properly created at the start.  IOW, just go to your redundant drive and grab the same file which of course isn't ruined due to sector errors.

Curious, in the case of having a bad sector on a .wav file, does that just result in a momentary drop out of the music?  I'm thinking so based on the fact that if you listen to a CD with a scratch it will keep playing past the scratch as long as the scratch isn't bad.

[Walstib62]

I have made it a point to keep my raw files going forward. I almost always do 4 channel, which requires "matrixing" I can't help but think that either there will be  technology in the future that will enhance the recordings I have now, or my processing methods will change/improve to the extent that I might wish I had those raw files to work from.

[page]

How often do people actually have issues unpacking FLACs?  I've mentioned earlier that I had issues, but that ended up being due to corrupt media discs.  Otherwise I've never personally had an issue with the actual FLAC file unpacking.  I'm not saying it's not an issue though...I'm asking if this has happened to people. 

For those that this may have happened to, do you double-check the integrity of your FLACs with your MD5 or FFP immediately after you create them to ensure the FLACs were properly built?

had one of my masters sit on an hdd once and it wouldn't decode after about 2 years. I ended up figuring out where the bad sector was, decoding up till that point and I lost the last 15 minutes of the show (which had the best song... bah).

I verify all flacs upon creation, mine was something went wrong on the drive over time.

Right.  Again bad media...in this case bad sectors on your harddrive.  I'm thinking that having redundancy addresses that concern as long as you verify that the FLACs were properly created at the start.  IOW, just go to your redundant drive and grab the same file which of course isn't ruined due to sector errors.

Curious, in the case of having a bad sector on a .wav file, does that just result in a momentary drop out of the music?  I'm thinking so based on the fact that if you listen to a CD with a scratch it will keep playing past the scratch as long as the scratch isn't bad.

While true, in my experience, having a bad media issue with a flac file is much more disastrous then a bad media problem with a wav file (was really the point I was trying to articulate, my appologies if that didn't come through).

[Neilyboy]

as far as redundancy goes if you only have one drive or burn to dvd (relying on media) you may want to look into creating parity volumes with a program like quickpar (http://www.quickpar.org.uk/). no affil but a decent program to save you if your media 'has a bad sector' like above..

may take up a bit more space but usually when burning to dvd you have a bit of free space. I used to burn off a bunch of music to dvd. Had issues with dumping the music from dvd back onto the machine (media failure). So for awhile there I was rar'n up everything then creating 20% parity so if I was only able to recover 80% of the files from the dvd + the par files I was able to restore 100% of the music using quickpar.

neil

[Scooter123]

My shows are mastered so perfectly and with such precision, that I can not imagine anyone, least of all me, wanting to re-master them.   

So I keep the split flac files only.  And have three (3) backups. 

[sparkey]

And have three (3) backups.

What medium do you like for your backups?