[ddots-l] Re: Can I make by Sonar files smaller by....
- From: Bryan Smart <bryansmart@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "ddots-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <ddots-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 28 May 2010 11:52:04 -0400
I've been traveling this week, with no net access, so sorry for the late
response. I wanted to throw this bit in, though.
When you all buy hard drives, particularly for this type of work, you need to
be picky customers. What you should not do, and I know that this is difficult,
but absolutely do not base your purchasing decision primarily on cost. Hard
drive quality has gone way, way down in recent years. Where once (as recent as
10 years ago), nearly every drive in the world came with a 5 year warranty, and
could be counted on to, in most cases, run for 3 or 4 times that length before
failing, most consumer drives now only carry a 1 year warranty, and will fail
in 1 to 3 years, usually sooner. If you're buying a drive to put in to a gaming
or office PC, and you routinely make backups, then go for the bargain. If
you're using these drives for long term storage of information that can't be
reproduced (those one time great takes in a session), or represent lots of
effort (Kevin's tape conversion project), then buying cheap drives is like
buying a house without insurance. It is an indescribable feeling when, years
later, that drive won't work, you realize that the data is gone, and then
realize that, for practical purposes, that huge block of your life that you
spent creating the data is also wasted.
My recommendation is that you buy one of the higher end Seagate drives. Even
their consumer drives carry a 3 year warranty, which is rare now, but their
enterprise class drives include 5 year warranties. The warranty represents the
drive surviving the expected amount of use over the warranty period. Some
people might use the drive continuously. Other people might use it
occasionally, and store it in a safe the rest of the time. For me, a
manufacturer's warranty period is as strong of statement as any about how long
they expect the product to last, and, therefore, how well it is built. Consumer
drives are only moderately stressed in home PCs. So, the 3 year warranty
represents that the drive will stand up to 3 years of moderate use. The
enterprise class drives are designed for servers, where the drive will be under
near continuous use. Seagate warrants 5 years for those drives, under
continuous use. Running one of those in a home PC or DAW, you can expect much
longer operation. You can quickly identify most of Seagate's enterprise drives
with the model suffix NS.
The price difference isn't too bad, either. One of their 500GB enterprise class
drives is about $90. 1TB will cost closer to $200. That's a bit more than the
typical hard drive, but, hey, your monthly house payment would be less, too, if
you didn't have to pay for insurance against fires and flood, or if they built
your house out of particle board.
When you're looking, rotational speed and cache don't matter, if the drive is
for archival purposes. Rotational speed improves seek time, and you won't be
recording 32 tracks at once to this drive, so no need to pay extra for that.
Cache would be useful if you were working with high track counts, also, but you
aren't. For archival purposes, you want a high quality drive with a long
warranty. For system and audio drives in a DAW, you want those things, plus the
high rotational speed and cache memory.
And, actually, for long-term backup, the absolute safest media to use is flash
memory. Flash is resistant to water, temperatures, shock, and most other
factors that will kill a hard drive. If you use flash for backup you want SLC
(single level cell) flash technology, not the cheaper MLC (multi level cell)
tech that is in the cheapest flash disks and memory cards. SLC costs more, but
MLC, for technical reasons that I won't go in to hear, can lose its charge, and
compromise your data, after just a few years of storage.
Of course, for anything important, you always want to have it stored on at
least 2 devices, and those devices shouldn't be kept in the same physical
location. If you have irreplaceable data, I suggest storing it on two flash
devices, placing one in to a water and fire proof safe at home, and leaving the
other in a safe deposit box.
Do not, under any circumstances, archive important data on CDROM or DVD. Even
the highest quality media will only last a few years.
Archiving data costs money, but losing that data costs more.
Bryan
-----Original Message-----
From: ddots-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ddots-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Dave Carlson
Sent: Monday, May 24, 2010 12:36 PM
To: ddots-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [ddots-l] Re: Can I make by Sonar files smaller by....
K,
Just saw a 1 Tb 5400 RPM 32Mb cache Internal Western Digital on Tiger Direct
www.tigerdirect.com for $49. But I'm aiming for the WD 7200 RPM 2 Tb with
slightly higher performance specs at ~$180.
Dave
----- Original Message -----
From: "Kevin Gibbs" <kevjazz@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <ddots-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, May 24, 2010 07:41
Subject: [ddots-l] Re: Can I make by Sonar files smaller by....
I have maybe 288 casssettes. Some are 60 mins. Some are 90 mins. Some are
120 mins. I haven't bought a drive for this yet. Thinking of getting a 1TB
drive for cheap. But I guess that'll work.
s
-----Original Message-----
From: ddots-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ddots-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Bryan Smart
Sent: Monday, May 24, 2010 9:10 AM
To: ddots-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [ddots-l] Re: Can I make by Sonar files smaller by....
I think he's worried about nothing.
Kevin, do you realize that, at 24-bit, 96Khz, stereo, a 2TB hard drive has
enough room to record for over a thousand hours? If you can live with
16-bit, 44Khz, stereo, then that increases to over 3,300 hours, or over 137
days of non-stop recording. I really think you'll be OK.
Bryan
-----Original Message-----
From: ddots-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ddots-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Dave Carlson
Sent: Sunday, May 23, 2010 8:53 PM
To: ddots-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [ddots-l] Re: Can I make by Sonar files smaller by....
Kevin,
Since each of the cakewalk files either point to a sound file, or if you use
a CWB format, include an audio file, I would think that keeping it as mono,
and perhaps even at a lower bit rate or frequency would make it smaller. Why
not try one using different settings in the import and saving to see what
happens?
Dave
----- Original Message -----
From: Kevin Gibbs <mailto:kevjazz@xxxxxxxxx>
To: ddots-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Sunday, May 23, 2010 15:33
Subject: [ddots-l] Re: Can I make by Sonar files smaller by....
We're talking about drawers and drawers of casettes recorded between
the years 1970 and 1977. this wil involve multiple large drives eventually,
particularly if the material is organized with any thoroughness at all.
-----Original Message-----
From: ddots-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ddots-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Steve Wicketts
Sent: Sunday, May 23, 2010 3:41 PM
To: ddots-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [ddots-l] Re: Can I make by Sonar files smaller
by....
Hi Kevin,
Why not just store them as Wav files on a dedicated memory
stick.
Steve W
----- Original Message -----
From: Kevin Gibbs <mailto:kevjazz@xxxxxxxxx>
To: ddots-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Sunday, May 23, 2010 8:14 PM
Subject: [ddots-l] Can I make by Sonar files smaller
by....
Dear All,
Can I make my sonar files smaller by recording
them in mono? It seems that I should be able to do this. I have a ton of
old cassettes of my piano lessons from the 70s. They were recorded using a
mono cassette machine. If I switch interleve to mono, will I get a smaller
file size based on the idea that a stereo file at 16 bit 44.1 consumes 10MB
per minute and that a mono file should probably consume 5MB per minute? If
changing the interleve to mono isn't the way to do this, what is? Is there
a way to record this stuff and save it as a collection of CWB files that are
smaller than stereo files since the original source material isn't stereo
anyway?
Thanks,
Kevin
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