Personalizing the Preservation Problem
I went looking for an old file the other day. As it turns out, the file was from 12 years ago, but that doesn’t seem so long ago now.
Anyway, I was amused to find how most of my images from that time were TIFFs instead of JPEGs. Thankfully, TIFFs are well supported now, but my old PageMaker files are largely useless to me. And while I was looking at these files from so long ago I found my really bad music from the day. It’s all in Passport Trax sequencer files, which wouldn’t be so bad since it appears that there’s a somewhat-current app that could read them — a screenshot shows it running in OS X. That is, it wouldn’t be so bad if the files weren’t compressed with DiskDoubler, a compression app also from so many years ago. Suddenly I was thankful that I had Classic on my machine and for this blog post that tipped me to ye old DD Expand, still available from the Info-Mac HyperArchive.
In short, I lucked out. My CDR was readable, the files retrievable. I found apps that could open most of them; only my laziness is preventing me from finding a PageMaker install disc, but those MIDI sequencer files might be more difficult. They were written in the days before General MIDI, so I’ll have to find the old synthesizers and a MIDI interface before they’ll be music again.
I wonder if it would be easier to get my old Fantavision animations playing again.
tags: aldus pagemaker, digital preservation, images, jpeg, midi sequencer, old software, preservation, tiff
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