Tape Preservation Article

It's great that there are people doing their best to preserve our musical/cultural heritage.

Many years ago, a fire at Universal Studios Hollywood destroyed the master catalogs (500,000K recordings) of record labels absorbed by Universal. You can read about it on this free link.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/magazine/universal-fire-master-recordings.html?smid=url-share

In the comments sections someone states that the binding lubricant was changed from whale oil to a synthetic oil.  Think of it as the revenge of Moby Dick!

The "whale oil" thing was a trope, after the fact when that old JVC vinyl was used for the original MoFi series of discs. That was an amazing formulation, very robust, very quiet and has yet to be duplicated. No one to my knowledge actually knows what was in the compound, and some have suggested that it was the discontinuation of whale oil as a lubricant and heat stabilizer (’aka mold release’) that led to the demise of that formulation. I don’t know. 

I had a patient years ago who was an archivist with the Library of Congress.

He brought me copies of the Nixon WH tapes, Johnny Cash/June Carter, Duke Ellington and several other WH concert performances done during that era - things never released commercially.

He said he was involved in the Herculean efforts to retrieve the missing “Rosemary Woods” gymnastic deletion - which failed as they all did. From Nixon’s lips to God’s ears, we’ll never know what was said.

He was bemoaning the loss of audiotape back then (circa 2001-2006) and talked about “bitrot” affecting CD’s, DVD’s and other digital data and how that data would likely be corrupted in 20 years. I heard similar things in the early 1990s from the IT geeks at Walter Reed’s data center.

I have DVD’s I bought 40 years ago which still play just fine - so far.

Gotta wonder if the things we do, say, create now are going to be any more important to future archaeologists than, say, shopping lists gleaned from the trash piles of the Roman legionnaires stationed in Brittany or the cuneiform information encoded in clay in Babylon 5,000 ya.

Some thing AI will just remember it all for us.