The Aun Collective Archive Weekly Update (#003)
I haven’t been doing as well as originally intended at keeping the one article per week guideline. I also grossly miscalculated how long sorting and backing up hundreds of terrabytes of data would take. It’s getting there, though. Given the potential of compact discs to rot over time (especially CD-Rs), I’ll be using this time to backup about 20,000-ish albums worth of music.
Music Collection
We got about 300 of the albums backed up, most in uncompressed, lossless WAVE files or FLAC, with a decent amount of MP3s thrown in as well. MP3s are only for the albums that were obtained at the time in MP3 format — I won’t be downgrading quality unless absolutely necessary.
I discovered lots of Indiana band promo CDs and live show recordings from the late 90s to late 2000s. Broken is a band with a few friends and acquaintances from my teenage years. No clue who Painslave or Stump Dickens are, but they are notable for the angelfire.com website on the Painslave disc and the strange seemingly okay quality of the Stump Dickens promo that contained a hastily burned CD-R inside. I wonder if this was the original condition of the release?
And we are one CD short of an entire 89 release Frank Zappa collection, and we have over two dozen Tom Waits shows. Lots of other interesting stuff being uncovered, with only one CD outright failing due to separation of the layers of the disc.
Games & Other Software
It appears one of our 10 TB drives is back up and running. Just needed Spinrite (hopefully). I’m going to put it through some stress tests with data I don’t care about, but hopefully we were able to mitigate data loss completely.
We are looking for any ZZT, Super ZZT, MegaZeux, and related games. Basically, anything from an 80s to mid-2000s game construction application. The aforementioned games are for the Museum of ZZT. I’m also building a Pie in the Sky 3D collection, Pinball Construction Set collection, and more!
We’ll post a second article with more interesting finds and a spotlight into a related topic or figure.
