I'd actually say the biggest disaster in history of music is what.cd being shut down. They had the largest collection of hard to find music, meticulously curated and in lossless formats. I doubt there will ever be such a complete collection and it was devastating to see it get killed like that.
I normally don't bother posting replies to comments on here, but I have to point out that this is an unbelievably bizarre and wrongheaded interpretation of the scale and depth of this disaster. Curated collections of lossless streaming music are possible to recreate. Master tapes can NEVER BE RECREATED. Comparing the loss of a collection of reproducible fungible audio files with analog magnetic tape is misinformed at best and disingenuous at worst.
I understand your point, but what good are master tapes if they're not available to be heard? I think you could argue that destroying a musical distribution network has the same effect as destroying music: it's no longer available to be consumed.
Mastertapes contain the music precisely as recorded by the artist themselves. They're not meant to be listened to or consumed actively -- they're there to serve as indelible recordings and references. Scholarly work on Jazz, for example, relies extensively on the existence of master tapes. Here's why:
When you record music to a multitrack magnetic tape like most of the recordings in this vault, you then get the ability during playback, for example, to fade individual tracks in and out. This would allow you to, e.g. isolate the sound of just McCoy Tyner's piano track on a classic Coltrane recording. Hearing his playing on it's own, without the rest of the band, could allow a music researcher to hear notes and sounds that might be masked by the final product recording, which flattens the recording.
One way of understanding this issue, which might appeal to the HN audience, is this: The process of "flattening" tracks to make the final sound recordings that we end up hearing as consumers is a lossy form of compression, even if the sound file format you consume it in is described as "lossless."
That's all well and good, but the problem with this obsession with master tapes is that they don't last forever, and degrade over time, along with every time they're taken out and handled and run through a player to create another "remaster" that has no dynamic range and lots of clipping distortion, since that's apparently what consumers want these days.
>I understand your point, but what good are master tapes if they're not available to be heard?
But they might be. The article itself gave examples of music long ignored that was rediscovered and became of interest, at which point the company could go to its archive and digitize the masters again with the latest tech. They did keep it archived in the first place for a reason after all. Alternatively with advancing tech and changing management the time may come when they'd be able to and decide to floor-perfectly digitize it all. Or down the road the public zeitgeist might change and support requiring the above.
Whether or not they were private, they at least represented potential, real and significant potential. Just like the Brazil museum that burned, or so many other sad losses. Having that potential destroyed forever can be rued even if it's not fully certain it'd be realized can't it?
>music long ignored that was rediscovered and became of interest, at which point the company could go to its archive and digitize the masters again with the latest tech.
For anyone interested check out the part-isolated "mogg" files from the Rockband games.
Harmonix doesn't really like people getting those stems out of the games, though (it can affect their ability to license music going forward). I'm part of the GH community, and when RB4 was ripped, HMX got pissed. Admittedly, the people downloading the rips largely didn't care about analyzing the music, they just wanted to play RB4 songs for free, so I totally understand why they'd be pissed.
They care far less about the stems they put out in the pre-RB days, in GH1/2/80s. But they were mostly covers in the first place (except for the bonus songs, and a small handful of main setlist songs).
>"I understand your point, but what good are master tapes if they're not available to be heard?"
Because they are they are the source for the products that music fans by. Remixes, re-issues, box sets and alternate takes all come from master tapes. Without the masters none of these things are possible. You are in fact "hearing" those master tapes just a copy of them. It's an incredibly privileged few who are able to sit and listen to the original 24 track 2 inch reels in a recording studio. VH1's show "Classic Albums" show often does with the artist and producer/engineer as the format of their TV show. It's worth watching for this aspect alone. There is a great example of why this is important in the article regarding the 50th Anniversary release of The Beatles's Sargent Peppers. These things would not be possible without the master tapes. The first generation of CDs in the 1980s are laughably bad fidelity. Now imagine the masters for many recording disappeared after those horrible fist early 1980s releases. Those terrible CD versions would be our source of everything going forward.
Steelmanning, if you’re certain you’re correct then you should assume the OP was misinformed, in which case why not kindly explain why without being aggressive? Educate us rather than attack us, please!
>'2. The Truest Capture
It is sonic fidelity, first and foremost, that defines the importance of masters. “A master is the truest capture of a piece of recorded music,” said Adam Block, the former president of Legacy Recordings, Sony Music Entertainment’s catalog arm. “Sonically, masters can be stunning in their capturing of an event in time. Every copy thereafter is a sonic step away.”'
There is no recording with fidelity greater than the master tapes. It is the canonical "lossless" audio source. To state that the loss of a retail outlet that sold consumer products is somehow greater than the loss of 175K original audio recording from which all retail products were generated from is truly bizarre. I didn't take the OP's tone aggressive just one of astonishment.
Remember that what.cd only stored metadata files like .torrents/magnets/.cues/etc. I doubt very few, if any, of the rare releases there were actually lost; they're still out there somewhere in the Internet. What was lost was the platform and the community that allowed said rare music to be easily shared and propagated.
There have been some replacement Gazelle trackers that have popped up in its place, but they're definitely fractured bits of the whole that was what. Not only was it an incredible place just to find the music that you were looking for, but it was a community dedicated to the preservation and restoration of music. It taught me loads about audio codecs and compression, and was my introduction to the world of programming and automation. I miss it deeply.
Most of the music on WCD originated from physical media which still exists in the world. I would say mp3.com being wiped was much more significant in terms of truly lost music.
This was true of Waffles. They were just torrent sites. People used them, musicians approved, leaks happened, and everything else that pirates do went down there. What.CD, however, became a place that was trying to build an archive of every piece of recorded music ever created. If a version of an album wasn't on there, a bounty was created that was often compelling enough that people would spend time and money hunting down a copy of it.
They weren't just torrent sites, they housed communities and (eventually on What) music graphs that led to countless new musical discoveries for users. If Oink wasn't shut down, What.cd wouldn't have existed - it was simply the precursor. Waffles was just (IMO) a slightly less popular destination for the diaspora of Oink users.
Forgive my ignorance, but was what.cd the private tracker with an insane interview process that people have written guides about? If so, then I see parallels - self-appointed gatekeepers of culture create a single point of failure, shit hits the fan one day, countless amount of work is lost.
Although people are always hesitant to say the name, I actually think you're thinking of Redacted. There's a whole website and IRC room prepping for the entrance exam. Unfortunately, the site is just as joyless as the exam process would lead you to suspect. The top discussion in /r/trackers right now is about exactly that.
That's the one. Although the interview was mostly to make sure you knew the basics of how audio files worked and why people on the site cared about upholding their quality: nothing an hour of studying couldn't prepare you for.
The database of various rare releases, artist graphs, user collages, etc. were the biggest loss.
Thanks. I never really had the patience to manage ratios and survive on private trackers, and fishing for invites and passing an interview to get into the secret treehouse was too much for me.
Too late for that of course, but couldn't that data have been stored somewhere away from the questionably legal stuff?
what.cd didn't host anything, so all the shutdown did was scatter the community. Since with p2p everything is on someone's local drive at the end of the day, it didn't destroy any files and didn't stop files from being seeded by peers. Only a matter of time before the community rallies again imo, or someone dumps all the magnet links into a text file and passes that around for all to seed. An unhosted what.cd would be immune to the RIAA and other scum.
There were several indie music sites that shut down that had really good stuff on them too. I always wonder what happens to the media that carried the data.
