What the Archives Doesn't Understand about Archiving

[Pratyatosa Dasa ACBSP]

Dear Jayadvaita Maharaja, Hare Krishna! Please accept my humble obeisances. All glories to Srila Prabhupada!

This email concerns archiving Srila Prabhupada's audio tapes, but the same principles can be applied to the documents, to the photographic transparencies/negatives, and to the moving picture transparencies.

There are 5 things which must be understood in order to archive the audio tapes properly:

1. The tapes should be copied to a digital format.

2. The digital copies should be in a lossless format.

3. The lossless digital copies should be in a format capable of including internal tags such as FLAC.

4. The lossless digital copies should be high quality, unedited, and unprocessed.

5. The high quality, unedited, unprocessed, lossless digital copies should be made available as free downloads on the Internet so that they can be added to the personal libraries of devotees all over the world.

The Archives devotees understand #1 and #2. They may or may not understand #3 and #4. I have no way of knowing. #5, they definitely don't understand, because they haven't done it even after having been requested to do it for at least 2 years!

Your servant, Pratyatosa Dasa

PS: I will discuss #2, #3 and #5 in separate emails, hopefully no later than tomorrow. In the mean time, the following is an explanation by a professional archiving service as to why #1 and #4 are important:

Archiving Audio

Why would you want to archive your audio at all?  

...everyone who has records or tapes will find that they have a clock built into them which is counting down every day to it's ultimate destruction.  They will not last forever and will, sooner or later, deteriorate and be unplayable.  This is already happening to 1960s tapes and older acetate recordings.  Many of what we consider "master recordings" today, will no longer exist in their original form in the future.  A superb copy will have to suffice.

Why would you want to archive your audio with all the noise and imperfections intact?

The reason that serious archivists don't do any type of processing is simple - it's likely that in the future, our restoration and enhancement tools will be even better than they are today.  Therefore, it makes sense to make a very high quality copy of a unique recording and save that for those future audio engineers.  This way, they can use state of the art tools to restore the audio in the year 2525.  Most archivists today use high quality sound cards and record at 24bit/96khz.  Don't forget, you can always restore your audio today from your master archived copy.

[ameyatma das [ACBSP]]

I also worked with KK for a short time in 1973-74 (not long after Pratyatosh was involved).  And, i have worked with audio, both analog recordings and digital and audio restoration.  In fact, I was digitizing my own cassette tapes and performing digital noise reduction on them many years back, in my spare time, using what was then called Cool Edit Pro (I had purchased that program back in the early 90's when it was shareware and had many emails with the author of the program).  It was purchased by Adobe and is now incarnated as both Audition 3 and Soundbooth CS4,   with Audition 3 being the more professional version.   It processes in 32 bit, and is very programmable in the noise reduction process.   I gave up on my digitizing effort because Madhudvisa released the MP3 set, and i just didn't have time. 

But, I want to state my 100% full backing and support of Pratyatosha's idea.  There should be released a pure unprocessed version of direct from master to digital files made widely available in a lossless format, as he proposes.   I fully support this idea and find it to offer the Maximum means of assuring the longevity of archiving Prabhupad's spoken words.   I agree with his premise that by releasing the files in unprocessed forms allows devotees all over the world to apply various methods to apply digital restoration and noise reduction techniques, rather then just a few devotees.   Personally, I have experience.  I sometimes have applied so much noise reduction to a tape that the voice sounds like it is under water.  But, there is no longer any hiss.  I have found, on specific tapes only, that a little bit of underwater sounding effect yielded was far superior to the strong hiss of the original, and it made Prabhupad's words clearer and more easier to understand.  The uncompressed noise reduced file sounded good.  However, a month later i went and compressed to MPG or WMA and it increased the under-water garbling effect to the point of being annoying.  I could find no mpg setting that sounded good.  The noise reduction processing and the MPG compression techniques conflicted with each other.  So, I had to go back and reprocess the noise reduction, allowing some hiss back in and removing all the under-water effect.  

But, I was working from a cassette tape that was made on a high speed duplicator.  What better quality i could get with a pure digital sample of the original masters?    

Then, last year, I had Ekanath send me a file of a lecture i didn't have a copy of.   The file he sent - it could not have been a clean digitization.   It did not have any noise reduction applied,   but,  it very much sounded like it had been processed via an analog audio processor.  The high frequency was turned up, via analog processing.  It may have been a Dolby type tape processing.  I know the original tapes were not recorded with Dolby.  It was very difficult to apply digital noise reduction to that tape.  It was a conversation tape in Vrndaban and it sounded that the microphone was near an air conditioner, it was very loud background noise,   that at one point whatever it was making that noise was turned off and the tape sounded extremely clear.   Still it was hard to remove the noise,  and i suspect the tape had analog processing applied while the tape was being digitized.   I might be wrong,    but,  if  i am right,   then DEFINITELY this technique must be STOPPED,  and the tapes need to be redigitized WithOUT ANY analog processing.   We need Pure Digitizations of the Original Tapes. 

ys ameyatma das

[Pratyatosa Dasa ACBSP]

Thank you, Ameyatma Prabhu, for your support, and for your very valuable contribution.

I also have some experience doing digital noise reduction using Cool Edit Pro, and more recently, using Adobe Audition.

On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 8:21 PM, ameyatma das [ACBSP] <amey...@gmail.com> wrote:

  i suspect the tape had analog processing applied while the tape was being digitized.

This is evidence that the Archives devotees don't understand #4 either:

4. The lossless digital copies should be high quality, unedited, and unprocessed.

Your servant, Pratyatosa Dasa

[Pratyatosa Dasa ACBSP]

Dear Jayadvaita Maharaja, Hare Krishna! Please accept my humble obeisances. All glories to Srila Prabhupada!

Please consider the following 3 articles all supposedly written by Ekanatha Prabhu:

1. http://www.dandavats.com/?p=8170

2. http://www.dandavats.com/?p=8196

3. http://www.dandavats.com/?p=8262

But the writing style of #3 is different and it's signed by all 3 Bhaktivedanta Archives devotees with "Parama-rupa dasa" listed last. My guess is that article #3 was written by Parama-rupa, and that he didn't feel that his name alone had enough clout, so he pretended that all 3 Archives devotees signed it. Then Dandavats.com mistakenly assumed that Ekanatha wrote it.

Chakra.org also published it:

http://chakra.org/discussions2/BMMar07_10.html

... and, not making any unwarranted assumptions, they correctly listed all 3 names right at the top.

Harekrsna.com/sun/ refused to publish the article because it is critical of Rocana Prabhu's and Bhakta Philip Prabhu's petition, and because it says:

... we are not removing or hiding anything controversial, and we are certainly not under orders by anyone to withhold anything.

... which completely contradicts one of Rocana's pet conspiracy theories.

But here's an item from #3 that is of grave concern:

... the transfer from analogue (Note: PRDs Australian spelling) to digital is continuing and that we are currently transferring the last of these recordings from the fragmented, unmarked, and poor audio quality reel to reels.

1. What about the cassettes? Weren't the recordings of Srila Prabhupada which were made by his bedside in 1977 made using a cassette recorder?

2. ALL of the analog to digital transfers should have been completed 15 years ago at the latest! The technology was there. Why wasn't it done? Why wait until the quality has deteriorated for an additional 15 years?

Another very big concern from that same Parama-rupa article is the following:

To say that digital is a preservation medium and not time sensitive, is a little naive. While digital is an understood technology, the storage mediums it uses are not archival. Hard drives for example are magnetic and susceptible to mechanical failure. Recordable optical disks use a dye that can be prone to failure. Digital technology to an archive holds three main values. Quick access, duplication and distribution, but as a long-term storage medium digital in its current form is considered temporary until the next stable medium is found.

This is complete nonsense. Why is he even bringing this up? The storage medium has nothing to do with it! This is proof positive that the Archives devotees have no understanding whatsoever of #5 from my previous email:

5. The high quality, unedited, unprocessed, lossless digital copies should be made available as free downloads on the Internet so that they can be added to the personal libraries of devotees all over the world.

Theoretically at least, digital files are eternal! It has very little to do with the quality, price, or longevity of the storage medium! That's what backup copies are for. If one copy of a particular file goes bad, you simply make a copy from one of the backups!

How does this principle help to preserve the audio tapes for the next 10,000 years? The following little story will serve to illustrate it:

During the 80s, I had a computer business which I ran out of the basement of our house on Lenox Street in Detroit. It involved selling built-to-order Taiwanese clones of the IBM PC. Business was booming. It wasn't unusual for us to sell $10,000 to $30,000 worth of computers in one day! Some customers would come from hundreds of miles away!

One of my very first customers was a Detroit police officer. The second he walked in the door, he said, "Are you with the Krishnas?"

I replied, "Yes. How did you guess?"

He replied, "Because I couldn't imagine a white guy living in a neighborhood like this (mostly black) unless he was associated with the Krishna temple down the street!"

I could immediately understand that this was one savvy Detroit cop. He ended up being a very good friend and did lots of service for the Gurukula children by video taping for them educational programming off cable TV.

What does this have to do with archiving? Well, it turned out that he worked for the Detroit Police Department's IT division, so he was very computer savvy also. Whenever he would get a new computer program, he would share it with all of his friends! He never even bothered to keep a backup copy! If his copy went bad, he would simply replace it with a copy from one of his friends! A very cheap, very smart, very reliable backup system!

Who was paying for the backup media? His friends were!

Who was storing the backups for him? His friends were!

Did he have to worry about purchasing the most expensive, most reliable digital media? Of course not!

Now that we have the Internet, the same sort of backup system can be expanded to the entire planet, by making the digital archive files available on the Internet as free downloads! This will give the audio recordings the best possible chance of surviving for the next 10,000 years, even if there is a nuclear war!

Your servant, Pratyatosa Dasa

[Pratyatosa Dasa ACBSP]

5. The high quality, unedited, unprocessed, lossless digital copies should be made available as free downloads on the Internet so that they can be added to the personal libraries of devotees all over the world. (See below)

... #5, they definitely don't understand, because they haven't done it even after having been requested to do it for at least 2 years! (See below)

Here's proof! Please read the following article published on the Sampradaya Sun on April 9, 2008!:

The Bhaktivedanta Archives of the Future

After 2 years, and basically the same article being published on two devotee news sites again recently:

Bhaktivedanta Archives of the Future

Bhaktivedanta Archives of the Future

... still no reply from the Bhaktivedanta Archives!

Your servant, Pratyatosa Dasa

On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 2:24 PM, Pratyatosa Dasa ACBSP <praty...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Pratyatosa Dasa ACBSP]

As for #2 and #3:

2. The digital copies should be in a lossless format.

3. The lossless digital copies should be in a format capable of including internal tags such as FLAC.

..., go to:

http://www.harekrsna.com/sun/editorials/04-08/editorials2808.htm

... again and scroll down to "Idiots guide to FLAC vs WAV vs MP3:"

Also, all digital processing should be done in the lossless format. Converting to MP3 should be the very last step, and the lossless versions should always be saved in case more processing needs to be done later on.

Your servant, Pratyatosa Dasa