I’ve been having a right royal sort out here at StudioLock and I found a box of old CDs that I’d burnt in the year 2000. These were mainly “bootlegs” or music I’d recorded from the radio or Internet sources, but despite looking perfect, none of these CDs would play back or could be accessed by computer or audio CD player. I suspect that these CD-Rs were from the same batch that rendered me losing half-an-album’s worth of masters (“Touched by the King” recorded in 2000 – where I lost most of the master recordings due to CD-R failure).
I remember at the time the media saying how reliable CD-R were compared to hard drives and other recordable media, but this appear to be untrue – well at least for this particular batch. Nowadays I put my failth in a NAS (network attached server) with two terabyte hard drives that duplicate each other automatically and a 1.5TB backup drive on my main PC, so effectively there are three copies of any music/document/picture/video file existing anyone time.
As time goes on and the propagation of self-created digital media expands exponentially with the amount of digital devices you have, you soon find yourself becoming a keeper of a massive digital archive. Especially if you are creative, like myself, and have your own music archive too.
But as I was going through the discs that were lost, I found a concert that I had genuine love for and wanted to keep desperately. It was Laurie Anderson performing at the Barbican the 24 May 2000, where she took part in her “Songs and Stories from Moby Dick” – a show that was never ever put out via commercial channels. So with no official release, I was pretty upset that my only copy, a pretty decent recording from the radio, lovingly put on CD-R was no longer playable.
So I went online and searching on Google and – lo-and-behold – I found a copy of the concert via a trading forum and downloaded it pronto. When I played back the recording, I quickly realised that I was actually listening to the recording I had made all those years ago.
You see, at the time, I was in touch with a fellow on the net who had a King Crimson concert at the Royal Albert Hall that I’d attended in 1995, which was notable because it fell on the same day as KC-drummer Bill Bruford’s birthday and one of the songs “Indiscipline” was altered to take in this fact. Don’t think I am some great bootlegger, because I am not. I have made a handful of recordings in my time and have only traded about six or seven discs for similar concerts.
So I traded one copy of my Laurie Anderson CD-R to this guy in the US for a copy of this King Crimson concert, and he must of traded it onwards until it because the only source of the concert.
In a weird way, by sending my CD-R across the ocean, I’d actually preserved it forever…strange virtual world, innit?
And this is the CD sleeve I designed for the concert.
Ain’t the Internet Wonderful?
The internet is great for this stuff. I mysellf use several different sites to find stuff. Also for most of my rare Bill Nelson stuff i use a online back-up. Burned some DVD’s with music data but most of them i can’t play anymore.
Bytheway….love your self made cd cover!!