For any of you who want more than just the headline: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ady3406

Although it’s correct that it’s a tape held in a cassette, it’s not like an audio tape that you can record over. You take the files you want to save and encode them as lots and lots of oligonucleotides (300 base pairs or so). The tape itself is printed with barcodes, and the DNA is applied in encapsulated form onto the areas between the stripes of the barcode.

The barcodes are used for addressing - now you can quickly spool your tape to the place where the DNA is, extract some of it, and sequence it to retrieve your file.

Reading a file would take almost an hour.

Still impressive technology, but I find the comparison with magnetic cassette tapes somewhat misleading.

Great so what happens when a cassette virus jumps to humans and we all get infected by Mariah Carey’s “All I want for Christmas is you”

They’re encoding digital files to DNA, which uses four digits rather than binary’s 2. Binary uses 1s and 0s while DNA uses A, C, G, and T. (You can remember them by the movie Gattaca being made up of the letters. The movie itself was not memorable, but I remember its name for that reason.) So essentially you have four digits, which means you can hold 2 or 4 times the data — I forget which.

“So why don’t we store everything in hex (base 16, 1-F)?” I dunno. I’m not a scientist. But I suppose, the more states data can be in (two for binary, 4 for DNA, 16 for hex), the less reliable the medium is.

Also, every song being 10MB isn’t too far off the mark. If you use MP3 or M4A 320, you’re getting about that. Apple Music uses M4A 256, so they’re squeezing under the 10MB average. I use M4A 320, so I’m just over. But I’m an individual; I don’t want every song ever recorded. What I want is far less, so of course the format will be enough for my collection (which is around 150GB, and fits on a 256GB microSD card).

(MP3 and M4A are not interchangeable. M4A is the newer format, and stores roughly twice as much signal data per bit, so while MP3 320 is still the gold standard with some, M4A 320 holds a lot more sound data in an ever-so-slightly larger file. So why don’t more people jump to M4A? Well, Winamp doesn’t support it out of the box (it does with a plugin). Also, some associate M4A with Apple, and, while Apple does use M4A, it’s an open format anybody can use. Also, habit. People have been using MP3 for decades and see no reason to change. When M4A came out and people were told they could get MP3 128 quality in M4A 64, they didn’t believe it, even though the science was there. And MP3 128 was the gold standard then. MP3 320 is as far as the format will go, and M4A 320 is about twice as good. And so yes, Apple Music’s M4A 256 is about four times as good as MP3 128.)

(Of course, if this argument of MP3 vs M4A bores you because you have the storage, FLAC and ALAC are there for you. Free Lossless Audio Codec, and Apple Lossless Audio Codec. FLAC uses the .flac extension, and ALAC uses .m4a (as well as M4A). I think ALAC is an open file as well, but I wouldn’t trust it when FLAC is right there. There’s no “better quality” in lossless because nothing is lost from the source. However, there is also APE (or Monkey’s Audio) which produces smaller file sizes than FLAC/ALAC while also being lossless.)