Comment Re:why not a record then? (Score 2) 440
Saying tape has a longer life is silly. I'd have no idea where to get an 8-track player today even though it's an analog format.
Same with a record player, but I could make one pretty easily. (there's a reason why we shot a record into space instead of a tape)
Really, though a documented and uncompressed digital file, properly kept track of, could last forever similar to a record even if we lost our codecs it would be easy to write a new one.
To turn your argument around, I've had CD-Rs go bad and those are a digital format... It is worth keeping in mind that archiving something onto tape is a known science, and that 8-track was a cheap, disposable format that no-one ever used for archiving.
There are standard archival formats for tape (1/4", usually 15ips, 2 track, no NR, either NAB or IEC curve depending if you're in the US or Europe). Back in the day this was pretty much the universal format - the album would be mixed to that, the duplication master would go to the pressing plant in that format, when they remaster something from the original master tapes today, the source media will be in that format also. To play it back, you need a machine that runs the tape in front of a pair of coils at a constant 38 cm/sec. Unless the tape is of a type that goes sticky, you should be able to recover the audio, regardless of age, and that is not something you could say the same of for a Protools project on a flash drive.