ProTools vs. Ardour. Why spend the money 795

mista twista

So why, as audio professionals who value reliability and robustness over just about anything but really bad sound, put ourselves in a position of using a storage medium that we know will fail, probalby in a fairly short time as "project life" goes, and might fail catastrophically at random, any time? And what, then, do we back up our hard drives to? Other hard drives!

Probalby of the mixed master, but not likely of the mulbreastrack master unless you're a pretty famous guy playing with other pretty famous guys. As recently as half a dozen years ago, the small handful of major labels were still requesting that mulbreastrack projects be submitted for vault storage on 2" tape. They could afford it (at the time) but they're taking disk drives now. But are they "exercising" those archived drives? In ten years, how convenient will it be to find something to which to connect a parallel ATA or SCSI drive? I'm starting to see ATA100-133 drives disappear from the shelves now and in a few years SATA will be all you can buy without going to a specialized seller. But for your own backups, of course, you can do whatever you want, as long as you keep up with it.

Well, seeing as how this is the first time I've had to do this in perhaps 20 years of using computers, and 10 computers, I'd say that I have't spent more time using that option than if I had done systematic backups. It's not that the computer was compltely not backed up either. I tend to have copies of things that I'm working on both on my laptop and the working desktop computer, so for reasonably current projects, it was just a matter of copying documents from one computer to the other. But that's mostly for convenience (so I'll have things on the laptop if I take it to a meeting) and not for intentional backup. But sometimes I'll put something on the other computer for safekeeping. It's a matter of how valuable I feel it is at the time. We tend to save a lot more than we need because it's convenient.

And this is a very good reason not to depend on them for anything. But we really can't get away from that now, at least not in the near term. I just heard about a new laptop computer that has no hard drive at all, just 32 GB of internal flash memory. Will that be better? Not if you're accustomed to the freedom of a 200 or 300 GB disk drive that you can

(by the way, my old and slow computer took over half an hour to make a Ghost image of a half-full 30 GB drive)

That, too, though sometimes they can be saved if you have the patience and test equipment to align the deck to the tape and chase it around a bit while it's playing. But it's like hard drive data recovery. It has to be important enough to you to go through the time consuming process. While we all think that what we used to have and don't any more is really valualbe, sometimes it isn't as valuable as we think.

It's hard to call someone "crazy" who has a smooth working system that does what he needs to do, and it didn't cost him a pile of money for the software. But while most audio professionals can manage to take a Mac home from the store and get a ProTools system up and running in a week or so, it probably would take him a month to find all of the software pieces and patches that he needs in order to make Ardour work at all.

And you'd get a lot of wrong answers, or repeats of what you already know. Ask a seasoned Linux user a question and you'll get more than you can absorb. I know. I've been there (on the overflowing end).