The future of music storage?

[leftybassman392]

Just watched an interesting piece on BBC's Click tech programme.

Best if you can watch the programme yourself if possible, but here's a bit of background:

https://memories.dustyoldthing.com/dna-music-storage/

https://www.ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2018/04/entire-music-album-to-be-stored-on-DNA.html

https://idmmag.com/tech/tech_news/dna-stored-music-future-music-storage/

The BBC piece is based on the ETH piece in the second link.

 

What do we think?

 

[tauzero]

It seems ridiculously optimistic to think that the human race will last longer than a few decades.

It's all very clever but seems fairly pointless. If the desire is to have something that future archaeologists can dig up and play, there's the issue that they won't know how to. If it's to have something stored for near-future use, multiple hard drives in RAID arrays in multiple locations will provide security, with the hard drives being swapped out for replacements as they fail, and for whatever the next form of storage will be after that.

The biggest issue is hardware becoming obsolete without the contents of media for that hardware being transferred (like old VHS videos, or before that, the Project Doomsday laserdiscs), or software being lost - for example, years ago I had a digital camera which used a proprietary format for images, which I can no longer see because the company has gone titsup and I haven't got a copy of the viewer software.