While common magnetic tape uses very thin, plastic-coated iron oxide, “talking rubber” uses rubber impregnated with iron oxide. Iron oxide (a form of rust) is ferromagnetic, which means in the presence of a magnetic field, the electrons in the iron oxide magnetically line up and stay that way even after the magnetic field is turned off. This allows cassette tapes to create a “track†of magnetically aligned iron oxide when the electromagnet in a cassette recorder creates a magnetic field.
But with magnetic rubber, the iron oxide is actually mixed into the rubber material; the whole band becomes ferromagnetic, instead of just the coating. According to that Bell System Journal article, this “talking rubber†could be around 1/16 or 1/8 of an inch think, whereas magnetic tape was (even in the ’50s) already much thinner at 1/1000 of an inch thick.
More obscure audio formats!
http://wfnk.com/blog/2017/01/forgotten-audio-formats-mp3/
Hopefully that article is science fact not fiction soon.
Lots of luck. Maybe in fifty years… hopefully.
Yeah, my car stereo will only play CD/MP3 formats.
Mp3 became the “least common denominator” that everyone supported. OGG Vorbis and AAC were both better than MP3 in every way, less bandwidth, better quality per bitrate. OGG has the benefit of being a royalty-free format too (yay) but the con is that most manufacturers neglected to support it, rendering it highly impractical for consumers. Mp3, for all of it’s flaws, remains the most practical choice in terms of support followed by AAC, unfortunately though it requires royalties.
While I certainly didn’t choose my vehicle based on the audio formats the stereo could play, I still wish the bundled digital players would be more flexible and even re-programmable. The ubiquity of legacy formats really holds us back.
FYI, MP3 patents are expiring very soon. Fedora included mp3 decoders in Fedora 25.
This cool site I read occasionally had a write up about it a few years ago.
http://www.osnews.com/story/24954/US_Patent_Expiration_for_MP3_MPEG…
re: car headunits — just give me a line in on the car, i’ll take care of the source with my nice neil young branded DAP.
i hate all the screens and computers on the dash right now. it’s partly why i drive a ’03 still.
ogg was better than mp3, i agree. ironically it was designed by the same people who now manage the flac source code, and their constant pushing of the message that lossy is good enough to promote ogg make them a horrible owner for flac.
apple also has accepted 24bit lossless masters for it’s iTunes music store since about 2010. but they won’t sell them, or stream them, they insist on compressing them into AAC first. weird. i’d pay $2 or so per track to own those master copies.
ezraz,
I don’t see why that should matter?
I actually find it odd when people complain about “lossy” formats that can represent waveforms much better than “lossless” formats, bit for bit. There’s no such thing as a “lossless” format in the literal sense, it would require infinite bandwidth to record a genuinely lossless audio waveform. I know it’s nitpicking, but “lossless” masters already have the implied digital losses factored in.
The shortcoming for (most?) lossy formats is cumulative losses in edits, which is a good reason to avoid them for editing. However for an end user who never does editing, I personally don’t see it as a problem for them at all.
I do realize how much of a hot button topic this is for some people, but this is fundamentally testable: given several FLAC recordings, which may or may not have been converted to OGG first, how many of us do you think would be able to determine if a recording was converted with high confidence just by listening to it?
I’m afraid I don’t have quality recording equipment to conduct this test myself, but does anyone else here have a high quality recording setup to record a few minutes of instrumental and/or voice tracks? If I took them from a public source, some people would be able to defeat the test by comparing the altered files to the originals. Can anyone contribute some original uncompressed flac recordings for a test?
Edited 2017-01-24 12:17 UTC
“Magnetic Tape Storage and Handling: A Guide for Libraries and Archives”
<a>https://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub54
Also from the Council on Library and Information Resources, and NIST:
“Care and Handling of CDs and DVDs: A Guide for Librarians and Archivists”
<a>https://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub121
If expecting the least of bad surprises after a few years… (as an archival medium).
https://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rt/NIST_LC_OpticalDiscLon…
dionicio,
Interesting stuff there. Looks like for archiving purposes, CD is better than DVD, probably because it’s less dense.
They didn’t test CD-RW, but they should have because I’ve read that the phase shift bit encoding is more stable than the dye based encoding used by write-once mediums. The dye chemicals slowly react on their own over time. This is also suggested by their DVD-RW tests.
It would have been neat if they tested physically pressed media also, even though it’s expensive, just to compare. Am I right to assume that physically pressed media should last significantly longer than these other alternatives?
While they explicitly excluded information about which brands had the best quality, it makes the study far less useful for real archivists, who need to know that information.
I would think there’s a case to be made for automated active archiving where old media is periodically re-read and re-written every five or ten years before it deteriorates too much. I would imagine (or hope) archivists already have a plan in place for this.
Edited 2017-01-24 00:21 UTC
Alf, thinking man, you always read the small letters, and the missing ones also.
Document tone could appear to indicate that CD-RW could stand better to the pass of time. But by personal experience, is not the case.
Years of long environmental exposure, at both CD-RW and DVD-RW media brought this easy conclusion. Refractive layer ends permeating, and detaching from CD-RW. Wipe DVD-RW with distillated water and cotton. Dry some days. Blank & reuse.
Not recommending RW media reuse if lengthly exposed to humidity, smog, heat, light, bending forces -even if small. Polycarbonate progressively lose transparency. A fingerprint becomes integrated to it, if left there enough time 🙂
Cloning eventually becomes necessary.
Archival works would benefit of splinting files as to not use the external, last 10% of surface, where 95% of surface damage occurs, also where vapors permeating the data and refractive layers start.
Would love Alfman link to “pressed media”.
dionicio,
This wouldn’t be cheap & practical for low quantities, but insofar as information longevity goes I think such disks would have the potential to live much longer before they physically deform.
Carsten Gnorlich DVDisaster gpl3 archival application has come back to life:
“The challenge: Optical media eventually fail. Optical media (CD,DVD,BD) keep their data only for a finite time (typically for many years). After that time, data loss develops slowly with read errors growing from the outer media region towards the inside.”
“The dvdisaster solution: Archival with data loss protection. dvdisaster complements optical media (,→ supported media) with error correction data in a way that they are fully recoverable even after some read errors have developed. This enables you to rescue the complete data to a new medium.”
“Error correction data, in short “ecc dataâ€, is either added to the medium or kept in separate error
correction files. dvdisaster works at the image level so that the recovery does not depend on the
file system of the medium. The maximum error correction capacity is user-selectable.”
-From the user manual.
http://dvdisaster.net/en/index.html
Used to use the Debian package:
https://packages.debian.org/stable/otherosfs/dvdisaster
Edited 2017-01-24 20:42 UTC
Data is saved at just 0.1mm from surface. Both digital optical disc data storage formats seem to be afterthoughts of the original, DVD format.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ad/Comparison_CD_DV…
Still waiting for a HD DVD revival, which is ACTUALLY an extension of the original spec 😉
That’s it! I upgraded from CD to Internet Streaming and ultimately to Vinyl. And now, there’s something newer? Can’t keep up with it all.
Why would you need to upgrade if you already had a CD or album? Lossy is a downgrade.
I do know one guy who ripped about 600 CD’s to 192k MP3 only…. then sold all of the CD’s. He’s regretted that ever since.
I do believe the OP was making what we call a joke.
After the last article about Elcaset, I went on YouTube to see what it was all about. And I found a treasure trove of videos about obscure audio formats on “Techmoan”‘s channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/Techmoan
One of the most interesting to me was the “Tefifon” – an endless loop plastic band in a cartridge, made in Germany in the 1950s, read with a needle like a record but with much better sound quality and run-time than the 78rpm phonographs of the day. Too bad it never caught on, it’s really awesome:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBNTAmLRmUg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tTURrAWVYE
Edited 2017-01-24 23:04 UTC
i thought this was already done..guess i was wrong..well more precisely not me but an essay writer from http://acewriters.org/ who told me so..i’m just a person who believes into everything..not the nicest trait..is it??
Edited 2017-01-26 13:46 UTC