So the first of April came and is just about gone, and with it D-day of the much-feared Conficker worm. If Earth Day were today we could be forgiven for blaming the darkness on a worm.
But no, nothing happened.
We’re alive. Mankind survives to fight another bug.
Why does this almost feel like Y2K all over again?
Yesterday I hauled down two old PCs from the attic in another effort to retrieve the contents from at least one of the two previously-mentioned and now-cursed CD-Rs.
So far we’re up to ten drives across eight PCs unable to read the discs, and I’m getting a little peeved. Both look perfectly OK… no scratches, degradation, fading, rot or anything visible to the human eye — and these are two discs stored in two different rooms, far away from sunlight or other radiation.
Hmmphff! Feared lost is a time capsule.
Gone to the great bitbucket in the sky is a small insight into the mind of those geeks who crawled along the information pathways around the beginning of the 90’s — eons ago in computing time, and before the WWW as we know it today was drafted by a certain Mr. Berners-Lee.
What’s gone are screenshots of programs and utilities past, scans and grabs of anything that could be digitised, drawings and sketches of anything that could be drawn, sketched or rendered with a computer, shots of BBS/ANSI screens and their users and conventions, and, of course, the obligatory bit of porn and smut of the day.
Outstanding! This is just brilliant on so many levels.
PS: Mr. Fritzl will be spending the rest of his life behind bars. Whether that’s much of a punishment for a 73-year old is up for discussion — Austria lacking capital punishment. Personally, I’d have locked him up in his own dungeon, with a few bad-ass niggers paying him non-conjugal visits from time to time.
PWND! All your basement are belong to us.
This, my dear readers, is the equivalent of some 300MB of data. Or rather, it was.
This is what approximately 200 floppy diskettes look like after just one decade.
Confused? Allow me to explain.
When CD-R/RW writers hit the market and got within financial grasp, I could hardly wait to transfer my ever-increasing collection of 1.44MB floppies (or “stiffies”, for the sake of our South African readers) onto this new, massive, enduring, and stable format. Or so we thought in 1998.
Continued from part 1:
While a person’s physical music collection is (at least to the owner) priceless, there’s a genuinely calculable and traceable dollar value that can be attached to the legal contents of the “My Music” folder of your hard drive. This, in my opinion, actually de-values the music and therefore the artistic worth of the original work. Their efforts have been reduced to a few megabytes which, on a more fruitful note, at least could potentially appear on several million folks’ hard drives or archive.org, instead of gathering mildew in a warehouse somewhere.
The smart thing to do is to make a backup of said folder… but is that actually desired by the music industry? Why would they want you to be able to listen to that MP3 until you fucking well die? Do they have the interests of the consumer/fan and the artist at heart, or is there some new format on the horizon?
Remember that this is the same “industry” that, until quite recently, shoved DRM down our throats and attempted to dictate when, where, how often, and on what device you may listen to music that you did legally purchase and download. It’s the same industry that continues to charge you 99c per track (or about 10 dollars for a full album) of recordings that were made some 30 or 50 years ago! It’s the same industry that milks any artist whose catalogue they have the rights to for years on end. Something’s not right.
And what of the legalities of a backup or 2nd-hand ownership?
If there’s a CD/tape/DVD/LP/MD in my collection that I don’t like anymore, I could either toss it, sell it, or give it away to someone else. Nobody seems to have an issue with that — by owning the piece of plastic that contains the sounds, I automatically also own the right to play those contents as and where I choose. Or do I? A transfer of ownership of the physical sound carrier naturally leads to a transfer of rights of the contents thereof (although it obviously does not include claiming ownership of the sound recordings).
And what of backups or rips of that CD? In theory, I should destroy them.
In practice, that is unlikely to happen. Those ripped songs will, in all likelihood, remain on the CD’s previous owner’s hard drive. Matters can get a little more involved should the previous owner have burnt the MP3 rips of his favourite songs onto a CD-ROM so that he could listen to it (along with perfectly legal rips of other CDs he owns) in the car or via the laptop at the office.
What is he to do — re-burn the CD-ROM without those now “illegal” MP3s? Yeah, right!
He can’t give it away, he can’t keep it. In fact, it’s not allowed to exist anymore.
Imagine now that our original owner dies. Chances are that relatives would inherit his CD/vinyl/music collection and absorb them into their own if the tastes are compatible. Or sell the whole lot if not, or is known to be worth something. Or a bit of both. Or neither, it becomes landfill. The physical media has value. It exists as some sort of tangible matter, even if only as coasters or artwork or raw material for the local recycling plant. Continue reading
Hands up those who still buy music CDs.
In fact, who still buys records or even SACDs, let alone cassettes?
Anyone?
Who hasn’t fallen for the charms of iTunes, MusicLoad, AmazonMP3 and/or Beatport for all their musical needs, buying and downloading gigabytes of music that you cannot touch or feel?
Not me I haven’t.
Call me old-fashioned if you will, but nothing beats picking up a real record and admiring the physical, real entity that I hold in my hands, wondering if its contents sound anything like the artwork and the photographs and the artist/band’s image (or total lack thereof) suggest.
A record is a work of art. A recording is a historical artefact.
This object, this piece of plastic and paper/cardboard means that there was a degree of effort and sincerity involved in its creation, a need even, the venting of emotion, or a statement. There were hopes and aspirations of either the now-disbanded punk group and their sleazy manager, or the still-unknown producer, or the struggling label trying to make a name for itself. Novelty records aside, there was somebody, somewhere, somehow who thought that this music was worth recording for posterity or commerciality, even if critics panned it and sales figures disagreed. There was someone who figured it was worth the effort that it took to get that piece of plastic to a location where the possible future fan could see it and hopefully buy it.
And then listen to it, hopefully appreciate it, and cherish it.
Physical vs. digital
There’s far more to an album or a concert recording than just the audio — or is it just me who considers a few tunes on a hard drive or iPod to be just bunch of megabytes, in no way a true, real, and honest representation of the artist’s work? Sure, you could burn yourself a CD-R from those select downloaded MP3s and print your own inlays from whatever artwork you may or may not get with your digital purchase — but it’s just not the same, is it?
Having just completed the first item on my list of “things to do” for the year, it occurred to me that “mixtapes” are something of a dying artform. At least, in physical form.
Whereas the definition of this thing called “mixtape” is a remnant from the days when they were genuine cassette tapes and not CD-R or mere MP3 compilation mixes, it is not the “mix” part I’m referring to here. In fact, DJ mixes and similar compilations are flourishing: online and disguised under the ill-formed “podcast” banner.
It’s the “tape” part I’m talking about — the physical media.
Or rather, the medium. Not only tape; that’s dead, we’ve already said that; it’s the recordable CD that seems to have become passé for music.
No, seriously: when last have you made a compilation of your favourite songs and burnt those to a CD-R as a proper Red Book Audio CD?
Nevermind your answer — I’m quite sure it’s substantially less than when CD-writers first became affordable some ten years ago, and certainly before iPods, cellphones and computers became the standard audio player, not to mention hard drive-based multi-media players or other networked media tanks.
Perhaps it’s just the novelty that’s worn off — or is it because, somehow and despite computers, ripping a bunch of songs off a selection of CDs and burning those is actually more labourious and less fun than taking those same CDs and recording them to tape used to be?
Does anyone still listen to CDs or watch DVDs in their original form? Have we truly forsaken quality (CD, vinyl, DVD) over convenience, instant accessibility (MP3, XVid, IPTV/VoD, YouTube), and portability (iPod, Zune, Netbooks)?
One should also realise that current removable media is mostly flash memory based, easily (trans)portable between devices thanks to a USB interface, is quite forgiving of rough environments, and of much larger capacity than any concentric magnetic or optical media carrier (external hard drives aside). Cost is another factor.
“From ‘the ashes of primitive and crude prototypes obtained and sourced through outright extortion; in the midst of a near-lycanthropic lifestyle dominated by personal and professional chaos, social hecticism, emotional upheaval, and insomnia tending towards self-destruction and professional burnout, the invention of the Cyberia compilations attempted to capture and absorb that kiss of fresh air that had appeared to have re-awakened the slumbering music scene’ in the year preceding the current millennium. The first compilation was released to an unsuspecting, yet greedy public on March 31st, 1999.
Now, a decade later, the market is saturated. Listenership has dissolved. The format is outmoded. And what a wicked trip it’s been!!”
After 10 YEARS OF CYBERIA, Rufus has left the booth and the studio. The reigns have been handed over, the buck passed, the mind lost.
Salutation: “Thanks to everyone and anyone who has ever wanted, received, listened or danced to, and somehow enjoyed the 1560 minutes of noise, chaos, and music that it’s been my displeasure of assembling and distributing over the last ten years. The journey ends here and now, on January 25th, 2009.”
Originally written January 25th, 2009. Revised and updated March 2015. See background story here.
