[Dylan16807]

> He believes that even the most open digital formats will become obscure and forgotten eventually and no one will really be able to playback lots of music that was only recorded that way.

Oh please. Just use raw PCM audio. No one will ever lose track of how to play that.

A 10.5 inch reel of 2 inch tape can be digitized just fine to 16 bit samples, 44/48kHz, 24 channels, most of an hour. That's about 7 gigabytes. So you could back up a huge number of digitized tapes to a dozen different locations quite easily. You could put a thousand of them on a pocket SSD.

[nemo44x]

I doubt it. There’s a better chance we don’t even use modern computer architecture and everything about todays computers appear archaic and that all the knowledge is lost. And tons of stuff is left behind.

[Dylan16807]

If you can see the bits, you can figure out raw PCM. It's super trivial.

If we're worried about being unable to access the bits at all, we should consider etching them into metal or printing them on archival paper. Tape won't reliably last hundreds of years. But for now we can keep bits alive pretty easily, with low but nonzero sustained effort.

If you have a lot of tapes, a dozen digital copies will survive a lot more incidents than the originals, and be a lot cheaper than analog backups along with no generation loss.