This is a nice summary of issues related to the storage time for archived CDs, from a C-Net community forum. Here’s the question, and see the link for the answer:

I recently read an article by a data storage expert who claimed that burned CD-Rs and CD-RWs can be expected to last only two to five years and not a whole lot more. I personally have commercially pressed CDs from the 1980s that still play fine, but I have begun to notice that some of my burned CD-Rs are beginning to skip, or not start (player shows “no disc”).…  What are the best storage methods for the discs that will make them last longest?

1/27/06 How long do burned CD-Rs and CD-RWs last? – CNET Community Newsletter: Q&A Forums.

‘Giving effective presentations’, a 23 minute audio PowerPoint presentation, is now posted on Ourmedia, a free and (supposedly) permanent archive of online content. It covers the following topics:

• Finding out what your audience wants to hear
• The changing role of live presentations
• Defining the objectives of your presentation
• Defining the audience
• Developing your own style
• Customizing your presentation to various audiences – academic, policy and general public
• Using graphics wisely
• Getting comfortable with mistakes

The presentation was originally recorded in 2004 for the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, based on a seminar I gave to CIAR’s New Investigators Network.  

I posted it on Ourmedia for two reasons – to see whether audio slide presentations can be easily transferred to a video format (answer: not easily enough), and to store it in a stable location so I don’t have to keep transferring the file each time I move to a new web host. Unfortunately, Ourmedia doesn’t seem to assign persistent URLs or Digital Object Identifiers to their content. That means that it will be very difficult to track down artifacts when the URLs change, as they certainly will.

I have also posted the presentation to Google Video and will update the information here when it is ready for public access. and it's available here.  The slides look horrible – almost too blurry to read – and the interface for uploading media is pretty bad.

Robin Good covered Near-Time this week, a new service that combines blog and wiki features. “Private Weblogs, team pages, group calendars and shared files are integrated in a hosted, secure collaborative environment. Near-Time content can be personal, group-based or published to the world.” Cost is free for a simple site, with more complex sites beginning at $5/month US.

Robin also reviewed VSee, a new Windows-only videoconferencing client that delivers high quality at low internet speeds, and includes application sharing. Another promising videoconferencing client is Wigiwigi, but it’s in alpha stage right now, so I’m not even going to link to it yet. I’m signing on to the site daily to check for a version that is stable and user-friendly enough to recommend. Both of these conferencing tools have framerates that are good enough to lip-synch. Most internet-based videocon clients show jerky motion and blurred facial expressions, or take too much computer processing and internet bandwidth for public use. These look great, though pricing hasn’t been set on either of them yet. In particular, they might be used for sign language communication or video interpreting.

The Public Knowledge Project at the University of British Columbia has developed an open source publishing content management system called ‘Open Journal Systems’. It promotes open access to journals by making journal publication as inexpensive and streamlined as possible, supporting every stage of the peer review and publication process. It looks great, and is described here. (They also offer free software, Open Conference Systems, for running conferences, including paper submission, archiving, and an online forum.)

A list of journals using OJS shows some of the pitfalls of open access publishing. Some of the links no longer work, so the content might be lost – there is no sign that the articles, if any, were archived. Other journals are poorly designed, and others charge for content. The journal links (URLs) are made-up domains like www.ecologyandsociety.org or sub-sites like http://calvados.c3sl.ufpr.br/ojs2/index.php/veterinary/index.php, which are unlikely to remain stable for more than a couple of years. Scientific journals must be archived, with stable references, or they are not useful to future researchers. Journal publishers, even if it’s a free journal run by volunteers, need to plan how the content will be archived in the future. All articles should use the Digital Object Identifier System (DOI) or some other persistent identity so that the documents don't vanish every time an agency redesigns its web site.

One possibility is to post journal articles on the Internet Archive, which provides free and ‘permanent’ hosting for any audio, video or text content (assuming the funding continues). OurMedia.org, the free publishing service, is described in this Salon article. I have not tested whether they have permanent URLs.

For information on why open access journals are crucial for social services and nonprofits, see my previous posting here.

“Virtual reality is now available to artists for about $3,000. This is the kind of watershed moment that video art enjoyed in 1965, when portable video recording equipment became available at mass-market prices.

“Software to create this art can also be secured free of charge from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where researchers at the Integrated Systems Laboratory under the direction of Hank Kaczmarski have created a portable virtual reality set-up developed specifically for artists. The open-source technology, known as Syzygy, is downloadable at www.isl.uiuc.edu. Others are also accessible through the University of Indiana's “John-e-box” system (www.avl.iu.edu) and at Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria (www.aec.at).” From In Love With Reality Truly, Madly, Virtually – New York Times.

This type of virtual reality focuses on visual simulations. Another type of virtual reality focuses on real social interactions within a virtual world, and is being acted out in Second Life, a 3D web-based environment that is built by players. In an earlier post, I reported that a medical doctor created a Second Life simulation of visual and aural hallucinations based on the descriptions of schizophrenics.

Second Life is a promising source of research in behavioural economics, democratic processes (see ‘Democracy: The Videogame’) and other social interactions.

Online job boards like Monster and HotJobs are hugely popular, but the New York Times estimates that “only 3 percent to 5 percent of job seekers find employment through the sites”, as well as being expensive for employers. Individual companies increasingly post jobs on their corporate web sites, but it’s time consuming to go through dozens or hundreds of separate sites.

JobCentral is a ‘cooperative, employer-owned employment search engine’ that is providing an alternative to the Monsters of the web. It posts jobs from the member employers, and is about to grow into a major player.

“JobCentral, Indeed, SimplyHired and Google Base, a database recently introduced by the search engine company … are teaming up to create a national labor exchange at JobCentral.com. The site, which has about 340,000 jobs posted, will incorporate jobs found by its partners and provide the technology to let those sites link to its information.”From More Jobs Being Found Online, but That Doesn't Mean It's Easy – New York Times.

“Corporations should not be given the absolute power to regulate how Canadians enjoy their music” – a quote from Michael Geist, an expert in Internet and e-commerce law, who writes often about copyright law and the extent to which rights holders (the publishing and recording industries) drive public policy in Canada and the United States.

This copyright issue has heated up recently with a fundraiser that is being held for a Liberal MP, sponsored by several major copyright backers, that some claim are tied to her support of federal copyright policies.

Copyright is a fundamental issue for a knowledge society. It is complex and controversial, with many groups of stakeholders, including consumers, artists and citizens. However, the government lobbying and legal action are being almost entirely funded by copyright-based industries, while consumer protest against unfair restrictions is being defined as zealotry or piracy.

It’s not about music, either, though the music industry is being the most heavy-handed right now. It’s about the ability to use information in a wide variety of ways. For example,

“The Liberal Party has provided a helpful reminder about why we need a fair use right under Canadian copyright law.  The Liberals have called on the Conservatives to withdraw an advertisement titled Even Liberals (currently the top link at the video portion of the party's site) because of copyright infringement.  The ad features about a two second clip of Paul Martin at a CBC town hall meeting.  The Liberals argue that the use of the clip infringes CBC's copyright and that the Conservatives did not obtain the broadcaster's permission.

“… [The] claim (which the Conservatives dispute) highlights why we need a fair use right in Canada.  … [The] notion that there should be legal uncertainty about the use of a tiny clip of a town hall meeting during an election is simply bad policy.  It is unfortunate that copyright is being used here to chill political speech, rather than to meet the law's twin purposes of creator and user rights.  When copyright law is used to do that, the appropriate response is not to change the commercial.  The right response is to change the law.”

From Geist’s blog

Two new services aim to simplify the process of scheduling meetings.

MeetWithApproval.com is a free web-based scheduler that lets you send out invitations with any number of possible meeting dates. Participants select the times they can attend, and the service can confirm the best time automatically.

The responses are saved on the web so you know who has confirmed.

I imagine that future versions will offer paid subscriptions so that you can save contacts, customize the messages, and save scheduled meetings in a private archive. But even this barebones free version can save a lot of time.

NNN (National Notification Network) is much more complex, powerful and expensive. As described in eweek, an NNN user who wants to ask any
multiple-choice question, including what times are best for a meeting, “can simply list the possible answers and
dispatch the query to a new or pre-existing list. There's no need to know, or care, whether any given person
actually gets the message via e-mail or cellular text message or
voice-synthesized phone call.”

NNN can be used for emergency notifications, such as school closures or natural disasters, as well as for normal polling. It looks very cool.

Over the holidays, I finally moved our entire home music collection to a digital system. Like almost anything to do with audio equipment (not to mention technology in general), the transition cost many times more dollars and time than budgeted. For anyone who is interested, I'll describe a summary of what I did. Every step was based on hours of research, mostly digging through discussion forums of unbelievably detail-oriented and knowledgeable audio geeks.

The exercise has also given me an opportunity to explore a few issues that are relevant to arenas beyond music. Because there is such a massive overlap between technology enthusiasts and music enthusiasts, music is an area where you can see the future of technology. It’s a case of what von Hippel calls ‘lead users’ – fanatical and demanding users push the limits of existing technology and should be studied to develop innovations for the broader market. 

In particular, even non-musical readers may be interested in bittorrents and social organization, as well as the problems in managing and retrieving information once you scale up the amount you’re dealing with.

MOVING TO DIGITAL

Here are the steps I took:

1. Copying all of my CDs onto a big hard drive.

I bought a 250 gigabyte external hard drive to hold all of my music. That includes space for data backup as well. Of course, I will need yet another huge drive to backup the music files themselves unless I want to risk the horrible process of ripping them all again when the drive fails. To copy the music into digital format, I chose a lossless compression format.

Lossless compression means that audio files are squeezed into smaller sizes, which is better for storing on a hard drive, but no audio information is lost. A lossless song on the hard drive has exactly the same information as the same song on the original CD drive – there is no difference once you uncompress the file. It's like a zip file. MP3, on the other hand, is a 'lossy compression format' – it makes audio files smaller by eliminating 'unnecessary information'. As you can imagine, there is lots of controversy about what is unnecessary. The better your sound system and the more precise your music (e.g., classical or jazz), the more you will be bothered by compression. It’s completely ridiculous that most online music services sell songs at only 128 kilobytes per second, calling it ‘CD quality’. That may be okay for popular music on little headphones, but not for serious listening or archiving.

I used FLAC, an open source audio compression program, rather than Windows Media Lossless, which is the other main option. Both are good choices. Windows Media Lossless is more convenient because it is integrated intot the regular Windows Media Player, available on all recent Windows PCs. FLAC has better support from some software, and Windows Media has better support from others, so it's an individual choice. The great thing about lossless compression is that if you change your mind later and decide to convert all of your files to the other format, or if one of the format you selected becomes obsolete, you can convert the files with absolutely no quality loss. And you can keep copying them into new, up to date formats every few years.

You can safely assume that any audio format you use now will be obsolete later, and the files you have carefully copied or bought will be unusable in the future. If the files are compressed and you convert them into another compressed format, you will inevitably lose some quality each time you ‘transcode’ from one format to another. Over time, the songs will become less and less accurate copies. As storage becomes cheaper, it makes sense to archive your music in a lossless format and compress it as needed so that you can fit more songs onto portable devices. You can always re-compress them into a new format when the old format becomes obsolete.

Some serious audiophiles recommend playing a new CD only once – to copy it into digital format. Then, they say, you should store the CD in some safe place in case you need it. A good copying program such as Exact Audio Copy has error correction, so the digital format will actually be higher quality than the original CD. (Any minor scratches or dirt will be corrected by EAC.) EAC is highly recommended by audiophiles, and it's essentially free, but a lot more complicated than Windows Media. For most people, I would suggest Windows Media Lossless, with error correction, and without volume levelling. That results in the highest quality files.

Hydrogenaudio forums are particularly valuable if you want to get details on audio compression or comparisons between different audio software.

To rip the CDs onto digital format, I used a Canadian music ripping service, Rippit, which picked up my CD boxes at my house and delivered them a few days later along with the digital copies. I did this after spending several days copying CDs and running out of time and patience. Most people use MP3 or a similar 'lossy compression format' to rip their CDs. If you do decide to use a ‘lossy’ compression format in order to save space or to be compatible with portable players, you have to decide between MP3 and one of the other compression formats such as WMA, AAC, OGG and so on. MP3 doesn't compress as efficiently as some of the other formats, but if you use an MP3 LAME format at 192 kilobytes per second, you probably won't be able to notice any difference between your digital files and your CDs. MP3 is the most commonly used format, and can be played on any portable device. I prefer using MP3 LAME extreme pre-sets which end up at about 240 kps using Variable Bit Rate. See hyrogenaudio forums for details, kids.

2. Dealing with copy protection.

Many of my CDs have various types of copy protection that, among other objectives, prevent owners from making backup copies. Most of the time, you can get around it by tricks like pressing the shift key as you insert the CD, or by using Slysoft's AnyDVD or CloneCD software.

In one case, I still couldn't copy one of my new CDs, so I had to download the identical CD from the internet in FLAC format using Bittorrent (with free Azareus software). Bittorrent is a peer-to-peer downloading program that allows groups of people to share their internet bandwidth for popular files. For example, it has been used to distribute massive open source software files that would otherwise require costly web fees. ‘Bittorrent swarms’ are the tiny pieces of data that are flying between groups of people who are all uploading and downloading the same file at the same time. While I download a file, I am also uploading it to people who don’t yet have the pieces that I do, while I am downloading pieces from others. People who download files without allowing the bittorrent program to upload files to the swarm are called ‘leechers’ or freeloaders. They are frowned upon.

There are hundreds of different bittorrent groups, and many offer public files – some of poor quality or with viruses – that can be located through bittorrent search engines.  I joined a private bittorrent group that ensures high quality files and requires each member to upload at least 80% of the bandwidth
that they download.  If members of the group do not contribute a minimum amount of uploading (‘seeding’) to the group, they are prevented from downloading any further files, and are eventually dropped from membership. New members get an initial allowance of 1 gigabyte, but have to earn more by uploading files to other members. It’s an interesting social economy. Only invited members called VIPs are allowed to upload new files, and they are bound by several rules: The files must follow strict standards regarding format (e.g., only FLAC, and with cue sheets and copies of the album cover), and the uploaders must be legitimate owners of the original CDs. All members sign an online agreement that they are only downloading copies of CDs that they already own. The site is hosted in an (I think) eastern European country to prevent legal retaliation by record companies. Given the strict rules against leechers and the clear elitism among members, it’s an interesting combination of anarchy at one level (re. music copying) and social/economic hierarchy at another level. It’s like an exercise in political game theory.

I don’t have any music files with copy protection on my system. I deleted all of the ones I had and bought songs without DRM (digital rights management). I change my computer system frequently and back up files in a few different places, and found that I couldn’t copy songs that I had bought a couple of years ago. Besides, online stores limit songs to highly compressed versions (see previous section) and aren’t worth the money as far as I’m concerned.

There are services that sell non-copy protected songs, such as Mp3tunes.com. Mp3tunes offers over 31,000 albums without Digital Rights Management, many of them sold directly by the artists. Artists can set their own prices, and can sell their music through an independent distributor called CD Baby. There is also a controversial Russian music service called allofmp3.com that sells whole albums for about a dollar. (Allofmp3 claims that it pays license fees and complies with Russian law… whatever that means.) Many aspects about online music are controversial, which makes it interesting.

Copy protection is, as you’ve probably heard, a big issue for the music industry. The music and film industries have spent a huge amount of money trying to convince people that copying is illegal, and for the most part the public media have gone along with the industry position. If you have any interest in the issue of intellectual property, copyright and digital rights management, you may want to read these key postings:

• A speech by Cory Doctorow on behalf of the Electronic Frontier Foundation given to Microsoft in 2004. The speech has been circulated broadly on the Internet and is available in multiple formats;
• Articles by legal experts that challenge the “recording industry’s misinformation campaign,” cited in earlier blog postings here and here;
• Results of a survey of musicians by Pew Trust, asking them what they thought about copying and sharing music files.

3. Playing the music

 Now that the music is digitized, I can play it anywhere without lugging around CDs. I have hundreds of albums in my MP3 player which I can plug into my office speakers or headphones. I have also bought a Squeezebox which streams music on my wireless network into our wonderful new sound system. Remember that the CDs are in a lossless format, so the quality of the music is identical to the original CD. The Squeezebox has a pretty good Digital to Analog Converter (also called a DAC – every CD player has one, and some are higher quality than others) that transforms the digital data into a format that can be fed into the high-fidelity amplifier. A remote control allows me to browse through all of the albums in the collection, create playlists, or mix the music by genre, artist, year or style.

4. Organizing and managing the music

I now have about 10,000 songs digitized. This presents a problem with the management of information. With CDs, most people end up having their favourite CDs on the top of the pile, and the least favourite in the back of the drawer. Now I have to scroll through the dreck I bought in a moment of madness 10 years ago while looking for something I want to hear now. On the other hand, I don’t want to throw away the music.

This is a problem of organization, archiving and information managment that emerges when you have more information than you can easily remember, and when it’s in a form that you can’t just conveniently forget or ignore. After a few weeks of thinking about it, I’ve decided to have two libraries of music: my personal collection that I know I like, and another library that acts as an archive. I can pull albums from the archive or deposit albums into it.

I’m also rating songs and albums to be able to find favourites quickly, and creating playlists. This requires a good management program. MediaMonkey is fantastic – free, powerful, and way easier to use than Windows Media Player and Winamp. It edits tags, organizes music, plays it, copies CDs, moves files… it’s wonderful.

In addition, I’m experimenting with MusicMagic, a free program that creates mixes based on ‘seeds’ that you identify. For example, if I select any song in my collection and then click the ‘Mix’ button, it creates a playlist of songs that are like that song. I can select a group of songs as seeds, and modify the instructions for the mix to select more variety or less variety. It’s a great way to explore your collection.

So that’s what I did over my holiday.

Happy new year

– Gillian Kerr