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Found very interesting read on how to store magnetic tapes

xchg.ca

xchg.ca

Active Member
May be it is well know for majority of people here. But for someone whose parents were playing wilt cassettes and reel to reel and all this just memories of childhood this is really fascinating read :D
And clearly my parent did not know any of this as condition of the family tapes sometimes beyond recoverable :(

https://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub54/
 
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Yes-this is a very interesting article-been around for some time and linked in threads here.

It's no wonder that your folks paid no attention to these concerns. Neither did I. Kept cassettes in the car and got very hot, then moved some to a hot attic, etc.

Despite the inference that digital information is forever, even this has proved to be suspect thinking. Lots of unplayable digital media out there.

Fortunately, for the most part, even causal storage of most of our audio media has not resulted in significant loss. Of course, for those involved in preserving recordings for future generations, significant care must be taken, and on occasion, loss occurs despite best efforts.
 
It is hard to believe, but the longest life practical storage media is paper! When CDs came out, we were promised 100 years life span. Then I started seeing maybe 25 to 50 years. Now, they have decided 10 is the most you can depend on. I have already seen more than one CDR data disc quit working, and they looked brand new. I think I have seen that referred to as CD rot. By the way, if you run into a disc that quits reading, try copying it. Worked twice for me. And don't shuffle them like cards. They aren't indestructible.
Also, I was reading about video media longevity. They mentioned different tape technologies, and the equipment needed to play them. In the list, there was several examples that were termed extinct, saying that there may only be one or two examples of the equipment left available to read them, if that! And I believe these examples were from the 1970s, and 80s. Creepy.
 
I have in my possession Iomega drive and 100Mb disc, which I used about 20 year ago :) It was stored in the attic... wondering how it fares right now.
@Zygmo Good point I will check some of my CD to see how are they.

And the most valuable point that is no reason of storing media if there is no device to read it....
 
Watch for storing tape medium near any strong magnetc fields.

I once had VHS tapes on a shelf up against my old EPI speakers, and noticed that the ones right up against the speakers had degraded with time. The ones farther away were ok.
 
I had a beautiful 2 disc CD set of Hot Rocks, as my only Stones CD set. Picked it up at a thrift for $5 many years ago. The original set included a thin closed cell foam pad over the top of each disc. Decided to tape that CD set the other day, and when I opened it, the foam had deteriorated and stuck to the CDs, actually dissolved the top coat paint/reflective layer. Tried to clean away the foam with some IP alcohol and that dissolved everything leaving a clear disc. Both totally unusable.
 
perryinva said:
I had a beautiful 2 disc CD set of Hot Rocks, as my only Stones CD set. Picked it up at a thrift for $5 many years ago. The original set included a thin closed cell foam pad over the top of each disc. Decided to tape that CD set the other day, and when I opened it, the foam had deteriorated and stuck to the CDs, actually dissolved the top coat paint/reflective layer. Tried to clean away the foam with some IP alcohol and that dissolved everything leaving a clear disc. Both totally unusable.
Click to expand...

Anyone still think "Perfect Sound Forever" ?
 
I noticed back in the 80's that cassettes left in the car lost some high end quality after about 2-3 days.

Store bought originals were worse than homemade type II.

Everyone should know not to store magnetic media near speakers (magnets) although specific A/V shielded speakers are generally OK.

With respect to digital, I have at least 3 copies of my entire collection- on a USB stick in my car, on my shop music computer, and on my home music computer.
Any time I add to one, I try to update the other two within the same week.
The beauty of digital is that there is no generation loss for copies.
I have however, lost some specific tracks for whatever reason, multiple times.
 
I recently rescued a cassette tape from 1966. The magnetic tape itself was fine, but the graphite coating on the inside of the shell had worn away and the leader at each end had gotten sticky with age. I spliced new leader tape onto it and transplanted it into a new shell, and now it plays perfectly fine again.

I also noticed that the original shell didn't have any rollers in it -- they just relied on the tape sliding across fixed plastic posts. That, and using a graphite coating instead of slip sheets, was a sure sign they didn't really think about the long-term reliability of cassettes back then. They probably assumed the format would become obsolete within a decade anyway, just like 4-track Stereo-Pak tapes did.
 
Yup, just don’t drop them! Those old late ‘60s/early ‘70s tapes also usually had open windows to view the tape packs which half defeated the purpose of the cassette in the first place. I’ve never heard of a graphite lubricant as that would play havoc on any tape path. Maybe someone added it, or the tape is shedding or the fixed foam pad (which were huge back then) has broken down. I have a few of those tapes and all still work surprisingly well if they had a felt pad and were stored well.
 
YY1 said:
The beauty of digital is that there is no generation loss for copies.
Click to expand...

I digitized about 10,000 tracks about 20 years ago, and made copies of the entire folder and put them on a USB drive, and another computer. On the second computer, I have experienced playback issues of some tracks. A track will sometimes click and jump forward, or I get audio that has a jitter, and other playback issues. I did not use copy with verification, so I think that errors were introduced that fell below some threshold of tolerable errors when files got copied.

Just my experience-maybe the HD has developed bad sectors (it's a notebook mechanical drive). One of these days, I will run checkdsk /f/r on it-to fix and recover files-probably will improve things.
 
I call those "digital skips".

There could have been errors during the copy, or on either the to or from media.

Also I've found that "early" MP3 rippers (circa IDK, 2002-ish) were WAY less reliable for creating error free files.
 
oldvinyldude said:
On the second computer, I have experienced playback issues of some tracks. A track will sometimes click and jump forward, or I get audio that has a jitter, and other playback issues.
Click to expand...
Remember that computers were never primarily meant to be audio playback devices. With a modern multitasking operating system, there are many system processes and other applications running that can momentarily steal the CPU's attention, causing the sound card buffer to run out. For example, if you have Google Chrome or a similar web browser, by default it stays running in the background all the time, even after you close it.

Even on a computer which I dedicate to audio playback, and don't have any other applications running in the background, I sometimes get glitches in audio playback. But when I skip back and play that segment of the audio file again, it plays perfectly the next time, proving that it was a momentary glitch, not an error in the file itself.
 
Zygmo said:
It is hard to believe, but the longest life practical storage media is paper! When CDs came out, we were promised 100 years life span. Then I started seeing maybe 25 to 50 years. Now, they have decided 10 is the most you can depend on. I have already seen more than one CDR data disc quit working, and they looked brand new. I think I have seen that referred to as CD rot. By the way, if you run into a disc that quits reading, try copying it. Worked twice for me. And don't shuffle them like cards. They aren't indestructible.
Also, I was reading about video media longevity. They mentioned different tape technologies, and the equipment needed to play them. In the list, there was several examples that were termed extinct, saying that there may only be one or two examples of the equipment left available to read them, if that! And I believe these examples were from the 1970s, and 80s. Creepy.
Click to expand...
I went through my CDs some months back now (mostly for archiving, as I don't have a CD player these days). I had one which looked perfectly fine, but was completely unusable when I tried to rip it to my hard drive library. I think it was an older 80s pressing of it, but still...

IIRC, I also remember reading something online about the US library of congress transferring lots of information onto CDs back in the 1990s, and some of the discs have failed in recent years, leading to some concern about their viability for long term preservation of important documentation/data.
 
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