Lacquer
Archiving analog media such as records, tapes and film as immutable masters, preserved peer to peer.
Lacquer is an archival capture system for analog media — vinyl, tape, and beyond. Its designers describe it as “MPD in reverse”: instead of a media server that plays from a library, Lacquer is a daemon that captures into one, fed by capture “stations” that can be anything from a high-end vinyl rig to a laptop ripping CDs at a friend’s house.
The guiding principle is laziness: archiving should require as close to zero decisions as possible at capture time. Clean a record, drop the needle, walk away — Lacquer captures a pristine, content-addressed master, files it, and quietly remembers what it still doesn’t know rather than nagging you about it. An untagged audio dump is a complete, valid archive entry, not an error state.
The deeper goal is preservation through distribution: many independent, hash-verified copies held by many independent archivists is the most durable way humanity has ever kept fragile culture alive. Because masters are immutable and content-addressed, backing up to a peer is just replicating verified files — and a collection becomes something that can actually be inherited, unlike a streaming account.