Audio Recording

You have just completed the hard work of completing the mix and producing quality masters for your recording. These masters are very important for your business, they will be used when someone licenses your master recording or decide to release it as an album/single in the future. No one knows just when. The main question now is: “How could I possibly preserved, backup or keep my sound recording masters for long term?” To do this, you need to pay attention to these two important aspects:

1.) Your masters should be keep as highest resolution as possible. This means:

a.) 24bit/96Khz WAV resolution (or even higher) for digital audio masters
b.) 16bit/44.1Khz resolution for CD audio masters (red book standard)

Your digital audio masters will be the basis of future conversions. Supposing in the near future you decide to release a digital album. This requires all the tracks to be in MP3 format. Of course, it would be a much better to produce these MP3 tracks from your highest resolution digital master than on a 16bit,44.1Khz WAV red book CD. You can request from your mastering engineer to provide you these two master copies for archiving reasons. But you should as well archived your mixdown. So as a summary, you should preserved these three formats:

a.) WAV format at highest resolution like 24bit, 96Khz master stored digitally.
b.) CD audio master at 16bit, 44.1Khz stored physically in a CD. This is using red box CD standard.
c.) WAV, 24bit/96Khz MIXDOWN (not yet mastered, but after mixdown).

The high resolution 24bit/96Khz masters (stored digitally in your computer or any digital storage) will be the basis for future reproduction of another redbook audio CD or high resolution MP3 audio. The CD audio master will be the basis for future CD replication if you are selling records in CD format. The 24bit/96Khz mixdown will be basis for future “remastering”. Supposing you decide to remaster your records, then you need to use the preserved 24-bit/96Khz mixdown as well.

2.) You need to keep these masters in a “reliable” storage medium. It is recommended you will make several back ups of your masters for best preservation. The following are good storage medium that could preserved the quality of your masters/recordings for the long term:

a.) External hard drives – you can purchase a high quality external/high capacity hard drive such as the Western Digital 2TB storage

These are large enough that can handle most of your projects. Take note though that the life of the external hard drives depends on your usage. Leave the external hard drive disconnected from USB power after use and keep it in a safe location. Do not always plug it to your computer; and only use it when doing backups. Doing this can extend the life of your external hard drive from a minimum of 20 years or even more as the MTBF (mean time between failures) specs of external hard drive is even higher.

b.) Archival DVD Gold plated disc – gold plated DVD have a guaranteed life span of 100 years. It is because gold does not oxidize or corrode under ordinary temperature and pressure which makes these DVD a very reliable way to store data. Since DVD is a high capacity physical storage medium. You can actually preserved or archived your high quality 24bit/96Khz masters as well as your mixdown. I recommend doing a backup to DVD gold plated disc aside from the usual external hard drive solution for best security of your sound recording masters. One of the best archival DVD disc is Mitsui Gold Archive 8x DVD-R.These disc will have a shelf life of more than 100 years. As a good practice, burn it at 4x if your DVD writer allows this writing speed for best results. Store these discs in a very safe location such as a safe cabinet or locker.

c.) Gold CDR – gold plated CD is similar to DVD archival grade but it will have a lower capacity. You use this to store your CD audio masters which will be used for future replication. The recommended CD-R is Taiyo Yuden Gold CD disc for professional audio storage.

d.) Online storage solution – all of the above solution are prone to damage for example such as caused by a natural calamity. The last and important preservation solution is to put your sound recording masters online. You can take a look at these two popular services:

d.1) Amazon simple storage service(paid): http://aws.amazon.com/s3/
d.2) Windows Skydrive (free): http://skydrive.live.com