Master recordings of 90s music on slowly dying media

The audio production industry website Mix Online reports that tons of major archives of music master recordings—mostly from the 90s—have been dying out and disappearing. The problem? Hard drives. For example, at Iron Mountain, a major media archival server site, nearly 20% of the SSDs they've been storage in their vaults since the 90s have started to fail.

Ars Technica sums the technical problems up well:

Hard drives gained popularity over spooled magnetic tape as digital audio workstations, mixing and editing software, and the perceived downsides of tape, including deterioration from substrate separation and fire. But hard drives present their own archival problems. Standard hard drives were also not designed for long-term archival use. You can almost never decouple the magnetic disks from the reading hardware inside, so that if either fails, the whole drive dies.

[…]

There is discussion of how SSDs are not archival at all; how floppy disk quality varied greatly between the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s; how Linear Tape-Open, a format specifically designed for long-term tape storage, loses compatibility over successive generations; how the binder sleeves we put our CD-Rs and DVD-Rs in have allowed them to bend too much and stop being readable.

The problem isn't just the physical hard drive failure either. Prior to the 1990s, most music industry master recording were stored on magnetic tape in a vault somewhere—you know, so that someone could inevitably go back to the original tracks and release a remixed or remastered 30th anniversary edition of the album, or compile a bunch of extra unreleased tracks for an overly-comprehensive 4-disc cashgrab collection in the future. But that magnetic tape was prone to deterioration over time, which is why they moved to SSDs (which, in turn, have also started to fail).

The rise of digital-first audio recording processes, however, has also made it more difficult to keep track of where and when the original digital audio files were stored in the first place, even if whatever hard drive is holding them remains intact. As Mix Online explains:

When people in the 1990s started producing music using DAWs, the entire workflow became digital, from writing to demo to tracking and mixing, but there's a potential challenge there, years later, for anyone trying to find the complete and final master. "What if somebody brought something in on an Akai MPX [sampler] and they didn't fly those tracks in, they triggered them?" Koszela asks. "Did the samples ever get copied to a master hard drive? And if they did, are they labeled?"

Similarly, in today's production workflow, a session could easily have been tracked at one studio, overdubbed at another, had strings added at yet another, then mixed and even remixed, perhaps across continents. "Who has the final copy of the session that consolidates everything?" Koszela asks once more. "If that master is lost, is there a copy or a version from earlier in the production workflow that will suffice, such as a producer's, engineer's or studio's backup copy?

"It's a plus that the data's probably out there somewhere, but it's also a minus, because there's so much of it, and in so many different states of completion. Who's got the right version? Is the master lost? Probably not, but will you ever find it? Possibly not."

If nothing else, this is making me realize I should probably come up with a better archival plan for my own recordings—ya know, just in case anyone wants to release a posthumous box set full of remixes for all my adoring fans in the 23rd century.

Inside Iron Mountain: It's Time to Talk About Hard Drives [Steve Harvey / Mix Online]

Music industry's 1990s hard drives, like all HDDs, are dying [Kevin Purdy / Ars Technica]