Archiving Files and Defence in Depth

[lightcrystal]

This might be double Dutch to 99% of people on LibriVox. Anyway...

As I complete each section of a project I like to defend in depth: that is I like to archive in every way possible. For instance let's look at formats. Outside of Librivox we can do what we like; I create the export/render in Reaper as LibriVox requires before rendering in other formats for my own purposes. A few minutes ago I took section 17 of Christian Astrology and made:

1. LibriVox required mp3 etc format.
2. high quality mono in Wav.
3. high quality stereo in Wav.

Now I have to make choices due to limits of space and sanity; higher quality files quickly get big. File 3. is about 200 Mb for a 15 minute file and that's nowhere near the highest possible quality. I cannot realistically render in every possible archive format. I am not a professional archivist. I wish that I knew one. I would like to ask: are there standards of doing this for libraries etc?

My broad intent with all this is to have both the original Reaper files and the above files rendered as I go. As in all good archiving we assume the worst [that I might lose the Reaper files done in the DAW] and defend in depth by doing something else as above. Thus if anyone wanted a high quality file of my narrated sections I would be able to, within reason, give a file to them. One benefit of this as well is that the rendered files last beyond the lifetime of technology such as the DAW; Reaper might someday fold as a DAW making use of the original files difficult or at least limited. But the rendered 1-3 above remain. [I am ignoring for the moment the issue of whether file formats such as mp3 and wav themselves may become superseded like the cassette tapes on my shelf that are boat anchors because I have no cassette player.]

I have also ignored for the moment the question of how to back up and store files [cloud? HDD etc] and to avoid data rot.

Thoughts? Ideas? Anyone else have experience in doing this?

[TriciaG]

I keep a FLAC of my edited but not post-processed files, along with the final MP3.

Like WAV, FLAC is lossless. But it produces smaller files. Is there a reason you're going with WAV?

[lightcrystal]

I keep a FLAC of my edited but not post-processed files, along with the final MP3.

Like WAV, FLAC is lossless. But it produces smaller files. Is there a reason you're going with WAV?

No reason; I am happy to save as I go in FLAC.

[Beeswaxcandle]

I keep the pre-processed but PL'd aup files from Audacity on the grounds that I can always regenerate the mp3 if needed and noise reduction technology is getting better.

Backup is on my normal regular pattern and I archive the files once the work hits Completed. I also have retained old versions of Audacity so that, should IA fall over, I can recover my recordings.

[iBeScotty]

Why render as stereo WAV? For original mono recordings/narrations it will not preserve any additional information/quality and only double the filesize?

For me, I don't usually make any additional uncompressed renders because I keep the Reaper files along with the original WAV recordings; those data drives can be backed up.

~scotty

[edit] p.s. Sometimes I may save a duplicate of just the Reaper edit file though if I make different versions with different editing. If you wanted to 'save as you go' I would probably do that for space efficiency