If you have any FLAC CD rips you downloaded from IA, you might want to burn them to a physical copy in the actual likelihood those rips might get taken down for copyright reasons now, especially if it’s long out of print; that’s what I did for
Ecco: Songs of Time, I burned it as an audio CD recently, that way you’ll ideally have a full-quality physical copy you can rip from should the files get corrupted.
Of course that should also be followed up with the FLAC files themselves being stored on some form of external media as well and not just a burned audio CD copy, but yeah.
This also counts for any legally-purchased FLAC albums off 7Digital and the like because there’s always the threat of those getting delisted for future download from such sites; I lost half my 7Digital library to exactly that.
If available, if I buy any more music in the future, it’s going to be a physical release that I’ll rip to FLAC myself so that I can at least still have that album in a physical format it should it get delisted from digital storefronts for any reason.
Just as an extra note, keeping backups should be strongly encouraged, but self-burned CD/DVD/BluRay are extremely easy to get scratched and then no longer be readable. The store bought disks have an extra plastic layer on the bottom that protects the actual data section of the disk, but in order to be able to burn them at home this extra plastic layer cannot be present. Thus any scratches/scuffs immediately damage the underlying data not just the plastic protection.
Self-burned discs is just added protection, ideally you should also have the files themselves stored both locally and on some form of external drive as well.
And technically, BD-R HTL discs are chemically similar to M-DISC DVDs in that they use an inorganic composite to store data where BD-R LTH discs are dye-based like CD-Rs and normal DVD-/+Rs, so they should be more robust because of that, not to mention M-DISC DVDs themselves use glassy carbon to store data.
Too bad there was never a CD-R equivalent to M-DISC DVDs because those would’ve been handy for burning WAV files or even FLAC files as an audio CD for long-term archival.
If you have any FLAC CD rips you downloaded from IA, you might want to burn them to a physical copy in the actual likelihood those rips might get taken down for copyright reasons now, especially if it’s long out of print; that’s what I did for Ecco: Songs of Time, I burned it as an audio CD recently, that way you’ll ideally have a full-quality physical copy you can rip from should the files get corrupted.
Of course that should also be followed up with the FLAC files themselves being stored on some form of external media as well and not just a burned audio CD copy, but yeah.
This also counts for any legally-purchased FLAC albums off 7Digital and the like because there’s always the threat of those getting delisted for future download from such sites; I lost half my 7Digital library to exactly that.
If available, if I buy any more music in the future, it’s going to be a physical release that I’ll rip to FLAC myself so that I can at least still have that album in a physical format it should it get delisted from digital storefronts for any reason.
Just as an extra note, keeping backups should be strongly encouraged, but self-burned CD/DVD/BluRay are extremely easy to get scratched and then no longer be readable. The store bought disks have an extra plastic layer on the bottom that protects the actual data section of the disk, but in order to be able to burn them at home this extra plastic layer cannot be present. Thus any scratches/scuffs immediately damage the underlying data not just the plastic protection.
Self-burned discs is just added protection, ideally you should also have the files themselves stored both locally and on some form of external drive as well.
And technically, BD-R HTL discs are chemically similar to M-DISC DVDs in that they use an inorganic composite to store data where BD-R LTH discs are dye-based like CD-Rs and normal DVD-/+Rs, so they should be more robust because of that, not to mention M-DISC DVDs themselves use glassy carbon to store data.
Too bad there was never a CD-R equivalent to M-DISC DVDs because those would’ve been handy for burning WAV files or even FLAC files as an audio CD for long-term archival.
Thank you for the reply. I definitely learned something new about long term storage today.