With most music production being done these days with software which writes to closed, proprietary formats, many multi-track masters will no longer be usable in the future even if the digital archives survive. Once the vendor drops support (as is happening in a different space with Flash), actually firing up a working system becomes an increasingly difficult challenge as the years advance.

It's pretty normal these days to keep at least submix stems if not each individual track as plain audio files, not only for future-proofing but for shifting to other software to do the mixing or mastering.

Admittedly any processing not burnt into the tracks is lost but that was true of analog multitracks too.

AIFF and Wav are proprietary digital formats?????

AFAIK every modern DAW saves its audio files to AIFF and WAV somewhere inside the project folder. Granted, this does not include MIDI tracks that have not been rendered, so if you don’t want to lose the sound of those tracks and any virtual instruments you are using, better render the MIDI tracks when finishing the project. The only downside to all of this is that raw multi-track files in a project don’t include any additional processing or edits (depending on DAW), but that’s what stems are for.

It would be good practice to render every single track to equal-length WAV files when completing the final mix.

I wonder if in the future we'll have the equivalent of 2019 Javascript transpiled versions of ProTools/Cubase/GarageBand/Ableton/Reason/whatever, all running in whatever the future equivalent of "the browser" is?

Good article, I'll have to see reactions on /r/synthesizers, gearslutz where people will talk their own solutions

Also how much applies to laptopless rig built around Pigtronix /EHX / Boss looper or Elektron boxes.

I did think the fan fret guitar looks a lot like Charlie Hunter's or Ormsby's but maybe he's come up with a better MIDI pickup, that wasn't discussed.

The maker in the article must be an incredibly disciplined and smart person. I’m so impressed.

FWIW, I’m a software developer, and music is my biggest hobby. I bought a foot controller at one point to interact with Ableton, and while I had no specific goals in mind, it is not a walk in the park. I still haven’t figured out how to program a set to do something like “when I get to this part, automatically loop the last 4 bars of incoming audio track X for 16 bars, then play the next clip Y for 8 bars”. I think these are called clip triggers though and should be possible...

Great band. I'd urge anyone reading the article to listen to their records, as you don't really get a sense of how they sound from the (really interesting) description of their techniques. It's much less "weird sounding" than you'd think from reading that! All their albums are brilliant.