Digital Storage Dangers - Digital Dust Could Ruin Your Files!

Originally posted by SonOfTheLawOfOne
Great post OP.

To keep it simple for everyone else, this is basically entropy at work.

EVERYTHING decays over time, so the magnetic domains on a medium such as disk will decay over time, or be interfered with by another physical process, and the atom that was positioned to represent a 0 will lose it's magnetic potential causing it to break free from it's alignment but not it's atomic bond. That's when it will become a 1 or vice-versa.

No magnetic media is safe from this, but CDs and DVDs are not prone to it.

~Namaste

Don't fall into the trap of switching to SSDs to try and escape the velocity density issues, either. What with electron drift, bit rot, transistor breakdown and silicon-isolator tunneling issues, you can get up to 12kbps loss, depending on NAND structure and refresh frequency of your SSD. And heaven forbid you place your SSD in anything but an isolated Faraday cage - solar ejection events can cause havoc with silicon-based storage systems!

Hearing the difference now isn't the reason to encode to FLAC. FLAC uses lossless compression, while MP3 is 'lossy'. What this means is that for each year the MP3 sits on your hard drive, it will lose roughly 12kbps, assuming you have SATA - it's about 15kbps on IDE, but only 7kbps on SCSI, due to rotational velocity density. You don't want to know how much worse it is on CD-ROM or other optical media.

I started collecting MP3s in about 2001, and if I try to play any of the tracks I downloaded back then, even the stuff I grabbed at 320kbps, they just sound like crap. The bass is terrible, the midrange...well don't get me started. Some of those albums have degraded down to 32 or even 16kbps. FLAC rips from the same period still sound great, even if they weren't stored correctly, in a cool, dry place. Seriously, stick to FLAC, you may not be able to hear the difference now, but in a year or two, you'll be glad you did.

sweet copypasta OP

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Go troll somewhere else with your copypasta

nice,nice...

reply to post by nobodysavedme


Very cool and informative post. My brother is a sound engineer out of North Carolina now. Used to work for a few big ones including Emerald in Nashville and opened a boatload of SAE schools around the country and abroad. He has said the same thing to me about this happening. He is a HUGE FLAC fan and total audiophile. I am nowhere near as "picky" as he is as far as audio, and I use picky only because he comes off as a bit pretentious when he talks about audio as I imagine most audiophiles/sound engineers would.

I do love that he can get me the best sound out of the systems I have in my car and house though. Being in the IT field all my life I understand the mentality, but honestly audio equipment completely baffles me.

Love these kind of well educated posts with real meat to the information the OP gives. Seems facts are a lost art in this day and age for the most part, and this thread shows just how nice it is to have knowledgeable contributors to a great forum.

Originally posted by nobodysavedme>snip<
Hearing the difference now isn't the reason to encode to FLAC. FLAC uses lossless compression, while MP3 is 'lossy'. What this means is that for each year the MP3 sits on your hard drive, it will lose roughly 12kbps, assuming you have SATA - it's about 15kbps on IDE, but only 7kbps on SCSI, due to rotational velocity density. You don't want to know how much worse it is on CD-ROM or other optical media.

Now I know this is a hoax. Rotational Velocity Density? You're trying to use terminology for addressing astronomical / galactic structures to computer hard drives? At least you didn't call it "Differential Centrifugation".

I started collecting MP3s in about 2001, and if I try to play any of the tracks I downloaded back then, even the stuff I grabbed at 320kbps, they just sound like crap. The bass is terrible, the midrange...well don't get me started. Some of those albums have degraded down to 32 or even 16kbps. FLAC rips from the same period still sound great, even if they weren't stored correctly, in a cool, dry place. Seriously, stick to FLAC, you may not be able to hear the difference now, but in a year or two, you'll be glad you did.

No thanks. MP3 and WMA have been serving me fine since the mid 90's, and I don't need another codec or player installed anyways- it just further fragments my 170GiB+ music library. I've several thousand 64kbps MP3's, ripped from CD, on my drive, and they have been there for almost 10 years. By your reckoning, they should be playing at negative bit rates, yet they still play at 64kbps.



I find it funny that on the official "FLAC" website on sourceforge, they don't compare their encoder to Windows Media Encoder nor do they compare FLAC to WMA, yet they compare themselves to Apple's "proprietary" codec. You'd think that if it REALLY was that good they'd at least compare their codec to the codec playable on the vast majority of personal computers and most Linux and Android devices.

If you really want to proselytize your favorite audio codec, just put forth realistic comparisons. You don't have to invent rubbish disguised as intelligent speech to get your opinion across.

And, can you explain why University of Texas (anywhere, not just Austin) doesn't have a PhD in Digital Music Conservation program? Google search results.

And this caught me as funny too:

wma compression is a bit better than flac-8, but not much

I've encoded a sample 5:39
and this is what i get
original size = 57.1 MB
wma lossless = 34.0 MB
Monkey's Audio - High = 33.7 MB
FLAC-8 = 34.8 MB
FLAC-5 = 34.9 MB
REAL Lossless = 35.2 MB
Apple Lossless = 35.1 MB

but when I playback with foobar2000
WMA = 932kbps
FLAC = 860kbps

WMA lossless with a smaller file size and higher playback bit rate than FLAC.

Originally posted by nobodysavedme
What this means is that for each year the MP3 sits on your hard drive, it will lose roughly 12kbps, assuming you have SATA - it's about 15kbps on IDE, but only 7kbps on SCSI, due to rotational velocity density.

Could you tell us why that happens? Does that mean that the SCSI hard drives spin twice as fast as IDE drives? Or does it mean something else?

You don't want to know how much worse it is on CD-ROM or other optical media.

I do.

I started collecting MP3s in about 2001, and if I try to play any of the tracks I downloaded back then, even the stuff I grabbed at 320kbps, they just sound like crap.

I have several MP2s from 1998, and they are as good as they were when I converted them.

Hello All,

I am here to refute the OP. I myself have a post-doctorate in Digital Technology Forms and Theory from South Harvard Institute of Technology, and I am here to tell you that the OP is not entirely correct.

Due to the recent change into polydodecahedral bit-forms on digital media, Digital Dust has not been an issue with electrical components in the last 30 years!

Further, the OP says that digital files are stored in "directories" - This is NO LONGER the case. In fact, digital files are now stored in digital nets of nano-wires (this is where the term "network" and "internet" come from, because a collection of files in nano-nets form networks when placed within 3 widths of an atom).

Archive files are not stored in "drawers" either. They are actually stored in rotating photonic traps which are interpreted by the computer micro controllers as stacked arrays of interdependent polydodecahedral bit forms. This property is EXACTLY why we can decompress one of these photonic traps by applying a decoherence algorithm to the photon trap: It causes the items within the photon trap to expand into larger bit forms where they must be stacked outside of the traps and into the digital nano-wire nets.

Oh, and PLEASE don't listen to the OP when he says you just need to put your Hard Drive UPSIDE Down! That is completely insane. If you actually do this, the rotational vorticies caused by the read-write head of the hard disk traveling around the outside perimeter of the hard drive (to read bit forms) will cause the on-board uranium back-up module to de-couple from the base head! If you've ever had a power supply go out and smell that burning smell - it's basically the same thing... and it causes cancer.

In fact, the best way to compress your media and guarantee that it does not decompose is to not leave your computer in the dark for too long. In fact, it has been shown that leaving a night-light by your computer is enough to disengage the physical processes which can cause photon trap and nano-net decay over time by as much as 99.99998%.

You may be interested to know that my post-post-doctoral research has led me on a path of attempted to mitigate this decay to 0%. So far the best method I have found is actually natural candle light. I've created a complex array of mirrors and reflectors to reflect 100% pure candle-light directly onto my hard drive and I believe that I will be shortly arrive at a break-through in this field.

I just keep things simple.

If the CD does not work I just time trail it back to it's original state and it works fine.

As for Hard drive and Data on it the same thing just Time trail back to it best state and there you go as good as new.

No fuss no muss it's great.

j

Originally posted by WhatAreThey


You may be interested to know that my post-post-doctoral research has led me on a path of attempted to mitigate this decay to 0%. So far the best method I have found is actually natural candle light. I've created a complex array of mirrors and reflectors to reflect 100% pure candle-light directly onto my hard drive and I believe that I will be shortly arrive at a break-through in this field.

Is this kinda like the talking to plants to make them grow?