ProTools vs. Ardour. Why spend the money 793

mista twista

That was my point, too.

And my point is that you can choose to do it or not. When you typed a term paper for school, did you back that up every night? If so, good for you. Or if you're old enough to have used a manual typewriter, did you make a carbon copy?

I never backed up a 2" mulbreastrack tape. MUST I have had to do that?

Yeah. So I reloaded the computer and moved on. There were a few things that I would like to have had back that are lost, but my world didn't come to an end. There were a couple of recent things that I still had in my mind and I was able to re-create them rather quickly, probaby better than the originals. There are some things that I'll probably never need again but that I was holding on to just because I didn't see a need to delete them. Kind of like the pile of electronics I'm accumulating that I don't need any more but that I don't need to get rid of either.

I agree. But my point was that storing data SHOULD be reliable enough so that we don't need to do it multiple times to butture that it will be readable once. Unfortunately we don't always have (or recognize) signs of impending failure. If I knew that the live of a disk drive was five years and that computers didn't go haywire and occasionally corrupt files, I woudln't worry about backing up things that were "safe." However, as I said, in practice, we've learned about the unpredictability of computer based data storage.

I would back up a master (mix) tape before sending it off to the pressing plant, but that wasn't to mitigate against failure of the machinery, it was in case it got lost or damaged in the mail. I knew that the lfe of analog tape was at least 50 years so I didn't worry about degradation with time. And if a recorder went haywire and broke a tape or accidentally erased a track, it didn't ruin the whole project (or worse, all of my clients' current projects), it was just one of those things that happens.

It seems that, in practice, the risks of losing data when working with computers are much greater than our former studio practices.

Do you were suspenders as well as a belt so your pants won't fall down?

I don't know, but are they supporting it? Probably. Are they supporting it at their usual corporate prices? Probalby. This is a little different than using a copy that you download from a web site.

And those are the Linux users that we see hanging around here telling us that it's easy and well supported and reliable and of course we're all expecte to be our own support departments because it's cool to be on the cutting edge.

Right, but when grandpa decides that he wants to record his band and goes looking for some software to load on to grandma's computer, that's where the fun starts. You can call me "grandpa."