Don't Forget the Future - Archive Your Music

3/24/11 - Some very important news you need to read concerning archiving. After you read this post, please go to Alarming News.

When an artist/producer finishes a project, they are often so beaten down by it that they don't think of ordering at least a production master for their own archive. (Archiving means to store important information for a long period of time.) And by the time they realize this it may be too late to obtain one. Many CD plants will not return the Production Master CD (PMCD) or DDPi that you send them. That way you are locked into using them for additional runs. Glass masters are not archived at CD plants as many tend to think. A CD plant will only have a certain number of glass discs that are then re-used over and over again. If you order a new run of CDs they will cut glass again from your master that they have on file. Or in some cases the plant creates an image file of your PMCD, or copies your DDPi to their drives, and then destroys the actual disc. And what many have learned the hard way, most of the ads you see for CD manufacturing are not CD plants, but brokers acting as a go-between that normally use several different plants. So as those people go out of business, there is often no record of what CD plant was actually used for a given project, so the master is lost.

But producers, artists and labels should consider not only having an additional PMCD or DDPi of their own, but a data backup of the mastered project in high resolution as well. Here is how it works in the mastering process (if you are dealing with a real mastering room):

Ideally your original source mixes were at 24 bit resolution, and mixed at the same sample rate at which the session was tracked. And hopefully it was tracked at 88.2 or 96khz. Regardless, the mix engineer should not have sample-rate converted the mixes. We know that CD-Audio can only be 44.1khz, 16 bit resolution. But the mastering should be done at the higher sample rate of the sources and at 24 bit resolution, then downconverting to 44.1/16 should be the final step before the PMCD or DDPi is cut. Even in the worst case where the source mixes were delivered at 44.1/16, the mastering will still be done at the 24 bit level. So you can still get mastered files at 44.1k/24 bit, which will have a sound superior to the CD.

So why would you want these high resolution files? We can look at two possible scenarios:

First, if we follow the current trend where the majority of audio will be delivered online, and if things stay at the relatively lo-fi of our current mp3 and AAC formats, then you will have the best sounding masters possible to create new bit-reduced files as you need or as technology changes. As I explained in my first post, your master has to be of the utmost quality if the bit-reduced versions are going to sound decent. So if you have mastered files at a higher resolution than even CD-Audio, then any down-converted files you create from them are all the better.

Second, and more importantly, we are now seeing what industry insiders have predicted (hoped for) for a couple of years - that as internet speeds increase, and as storage gets smaller and cheaper, we will see high-resolution download options for consumers interested in better sound quality. You now see many bands offering at least CD resolution WAV files and even better on their personal sites as a more expensive option to the mp3 download. Radiohead's "King of Limbs" was offered as 44.1/16 WAVs for instance. And we are beginning to see sights like hdtracks.com that offer current and classic albums in as high as 176.2k/24 bit! So as this trend hopefully continues you will eventually (or even now) be able to offer high-resolution downloads of your music.

1/18/12 - Click Here for important update on tracking and mixing in HD.

Less likely, if a new high-resolution consumer audio format is released that is actually accepted by the general public, then you have high-resolution mastered files that you can release on the new format. Unfortunately, DVD-Audio and SACD were miserable failures. And the majors aren't likely to get behind any new hard delivery mediums anytime soon, if ever. 

A qualified mastering room will be able to offer a DVD containing your high-resolution mastered tracks as well as a Production Master DDPi file set for CD manufacturing, and your unmastered source mixes. At DES Mastering it is our standard practice to also include text files of the pq and delivery logs, metadata verification as well as mastering details. Ideally you would get both a Production Master CD and a data DVD as described for your archive. As this will probably run a few hundred dollars, you should be able to arrange with your mastering room to have all of this created at a later date. Mastering rooms can usually create archival masters within a two or three month period after the project is finished.

IF YOU HAVE DAT MASTERS, YOU NEED TO GET THEM TRANSFERRED NOW!!!

If you have important music on DATs you need to get them transferred to standard audio files as soon as you can. There are two reasons for this; number one is that the DAT is a mechanical format that is subject to failure. Even in mastering rooms with well maintained machines a snag can happen and a tape can be ruined. Also, depending on how the tape was stored, the data can become unreadable.

One of the biggest reasons however is that DAT machines are no longer made, and are no longer commonly seen in most studios. And fewer and fewer technicians can repair them or have access to parts. So before they all go away, get your DATs transferred!