Quote:
Originally Posted by bbqncigars
800 vinyl albums is certainly possible (I've got about half that), and not subject to some of the degradation that the digital format may suffer from. I appreciate the flexibility the digital world allows. As long as my stuff lasts as long as I do, I'm good.
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What degradation is there in digital media?
If you start out with as open and lossless a format as possible (FLAC for audio, EPUB for e-books), you can convert to any future format without losing anything. As EPUB and FLAC files are still sold today, I expect the format to last at least another 20 years before the industry is going to start phasing them out. They're so common that it might take more than half a century. (I don't see mp3 or jpg become obsolete for general use anytime soon, for example.)
And as j.p.s. noted above: LP's get worse when you play them often. CD's, let alone files, don't (if you don't scratch the CD's and don't corrupt the files, obviously).
The two things that suffer from degradation are:
- Graphics. After monitors switched to pixel-based structure with LCD (instead of CRT, which was sharp at any resolution), graphics created for smaller amounts of pixels will become blurrier and blurrier as the amount of pixels in monitors rise, and the size becomes bigger.
- Software. Microsoft is doing a good job of keeping old software running, but sometimes you need hacks to get it done. At some point, more and more legacy code will be dropped, and some software will just be impossible to run without resorting to virtualisation and/or emulation of old operating systems and hardware.