At 08:24 PM 5/25/06 -0400, Neal Gittleman wrote: >it strikes me that an old-machine-for-old- >files solution doesn't seem so out of whack...
I don't think it's a bad concept in theory. But it comes up against the reality of an ever-increasing load of quickly & consciously obsoleted formats. Why accept something that doesn't have to be quickly obsoleted? As a technological composer/musician, I've used so many formats that work can quickly become lost. I try to minimize loss, maintain forward compatibility, or forward-convert. There is no insurmountable barrier to recapturing most earlier past formats if there is awareness, desire, time, and cash to do so. Right now I have a studio full of hardware to run older formats, but no time to move it along. (A real history lesson is Laurie Spiegel's studio -- rooms of equipment to run formats and even software dating from the 1960s.) Here we're only talking about Finale and the ability to forward-shift a software format through evolving versions. Eventually it stops, as does the hardware. But with Finale, at least we have the option to print our results on acid-free paper using archival printers. How does one create software-dependent work that will last? This has been on my mind lately as the process of forward-shifting becomes impossible to achieve -- so much material (even the good stuff!), so little time, and new barriers in software. My earliest non-paper composition dates from 1969. Since then I have use more than fifty different formats for composition, from plain stereo tape and paper tape straight through multichannel software studio files and flash cards. One complex interactive soundscape installation was EPROM-based, and although the hardware survives in storage, the EPROMs have self-erased in the intervening 23 years. Who knew? The program can be re-entered from paper copies, but the stored interactive data is gone, the entire record of the work's native place & effect. I have a 2-minute cassette document recorded just before the soundscape was dismantled. After the failure of my dbx I reel recorder, I found another in almost-new condition being dumped. But that was a stroke of luck. I have one of what is probably the last generation of DAT recorders, and with more than 1,000 DATs on my shelves, I'll have to triage them at some point. And appropos of the topic here, a 1994 live performance piece with computer control depends on software that continues to work properly only through the good graces of Windows' ability to run earlier programs. I had thought web technology would offer a more lasting way of working, but its formats are evolving quickly as well, though fortunately not yet obsoleting the work of its first generation (except for Flash artists). The cycle increases in speed. Radio tubes were replenished (and continue to be replenished) 50 years after the transistor entered the mainstream. Not all of them, but the leading tubes can still be found to original spec. New designs continue to be built around them. 35mm film, first made in 1889, is only slowly reaching the end of its life -- but earlier digital camera formats are already unreadable. And the leading operating system vendors, hardware makers, and software manufacturers? How long? I'm increasingly sensitive to manufacturers arbitrarily cutting off customers' ability to read and execute work they might have done just a few years earlier, whether by simply dismissing the ability to archive as insignificant or uneconomical, or deliberately developing technological barriers. Dennis _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
