GoodBye CD; Hello Flash Drive

[risabet]

As a graphic designer who hasn't worked for 18 months in my field (mostly because I've been displaced by computer geeks and code-monkeys who just happen to have a copy of Paint or PhotoShop, and therefore feel they can call themselves "web designers"), I can only shake my head ruefully at the proposition of completely media-less music distribution. An entire segment of the music industry will potentially be eliminated with this idea--the graphic designers who design album covers.

Of course I'll admit more than a LITTLE self-interest in this specific aspect of the music industry, but I feel that the divorce of music from the visual arts is an aesthetic tragedy, and we, as consumers should demand that if we are going to be, in the future, permanently denied the ability to own physical permanent copies of music, then at the very least, the music industry should include high-res graphics with these downloaded albums. We, as consumers, write the checks--we should be able to make the rules...

The divorce of visual art from recorded music is a dire proposition indeed. Album art for vinyl was an iconic example of popular art in the mid-late 20th century. Not may people could recognize a Rauschenberg, Calder, Klee, or Magrite painting, but show 100 people on the street half a dozen popular rock albums with the names blocked out, and I'd venture that they'd all get at least 75% of the bands correct...

The Grateful Dead, Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Herb Alpert, Kansas, Boston, The Capitol Steps--some of the most iconic art of their period was album covers.

And that medium is, as we speak, vanishing. The CD cut the surface area of music packaging to 1/4 the size of an LP album. Digitally distributed music rarely even comes with any art at all, and when it does, it's usually a very low-res JPEG.

No, I cannot have ANYTHING good to say about a distribution method for music that 1) does not provide me with a permanent, physical copy of my purchase, and 2) divorces music from the visual arts.

I pray for the future of the music business. We are headed for the days of pre-album music distribution--when the 45rpm single was king, and people bought their music one song at a time--usually the ONE song that the RECORD COMPANIES thought you should be hearing. This is a sad, uncreative, and VERY dire state of affairs, as far as the future options available to music consumers is concerned.

--Richard

Indeed, the album art is a special part of the vinyl experience and every other format is a joke in comparison. Whether photographic i.e. Bluenote covers, drawings i.e. David Stone Martin covers, and many others, as a graphic arts medium the 12" vinyl album format has no peer.

 

[Rich]

Flash memory is a long way down the road and currently way to expensive. How much memory will you need for a music at SACD quality which is the minimum digital format for high-end sound IMO? 4.7GB per. So let's assume that you have a 32GB CF card @ $150.00 with 6 titles on it @ $20.00 per title you've got something that cost ~$270.00, not exactly a mass market price point.

Flash memory is currently too expensive, but that is changing rapidly. The use of this type of memory in high definition video cameras is going to spur development quickly. They will soon be releasing 32 Gb flash cards for this purpose and larger cards will be just a few years down the road. The price of the smaller cards, such as 4 and 8 GB (large enough for SACD titles) will drop rapidly. You can already see that, with 1 GB cards for less than $10 at Newegg when that size a few years ago would set you back hundreds of dollars.

I got one of the first media servers back around the year 2000. It had a 160 GB hard drive and you had to pay through the nose for that. Now you can get a 1 TB drive for less than that drive cost in 2000. Don't for a moment think that we are that far off from being able to use flash memory as a viable cost-efficient medium for music distribution. The bigger question is whether they can or will tweak the technology to make it a viable long-term storage solution.

 

[Rich]

Flash memory is currently too expensive, but that is changing rapidly.

According to the article linked below, flash memory prices dropped 60% last year and are due for possibly another 55% drop in the coming year. Within just a few years, price won't be the issue with this technology and neither will storage capacity. I think within five years, the only issue with using flash memory as a music storage and playback medium will be the question of data longevity. I believe that is a technological hurdle that can be overcome, if it is something that the industry believes is important enough to consumers to be worth the effort. Here is the article:

Flash memory prices may plummet, analysts say

 

[Steve]

I completely agree that flash prices are falling and densities are increasing. This will enable flash drives in many devices that currently rely on rotating media...such as video cameras and notebooks. However, there is no value being placed on longevity, at least not the kind of longevity we are discussing here.

While I don't know the exact numbers, I would be willing to bet that flash in inherently less stable over time than CD's or DVD's. Flash has limited read/write capabilities, which degrade over time, so it seems reasonable that it would degrade, even without activity. Again, the key to data longevity is going to be lossless redundancy, regardless of the medium.

Regarding codec longevity, I disagree that codec support will eventually go away. It is just software. It is cheap and easy to move the older codecs forward. Heck, how long has jpeg been around, or MPEG2? It costs next to nothing to support open source codecs such as FLAC, so why not do it? It's just software. Worst case, data could easily be transcoded from an older lossless codec to a newer one, if the need arose.

 

[ralflar]

Limited amount of [i]write[/i] cycles in flash cards

It is true that each memory cell on a flash card can be rewritten only so many times. However, the card controller logic distributes the write load over as many memory cells as evenly as possible. Cells which have been written to too often will be maksed out by the controller much like bad sectors on a hard drive. Therefore the a flash card will begin to lose capacity after a (long) while and then gradually continue to lose capacity. You'll have to write and delete a lot of new data to that card frequently before that happens. And when it happens you'll notice it, and the card will be so obsolete that you'd want a new one anyway.

In other words, a flash card will not degrade by reading data from it or not using it at all. Flash cards sold as a CD/DVD replacement would almost certainly be read-only just like CDs/DVDs. There really is no reason for concerns about rd/wr longevity.

And from mechanical and environmental perspectives the flash card is the most robust/rugged storage medium available today. Its related specifications far exceed those of the optical and magnetic media. Many (Most?) flash cards will get wiped out by an EMP though...