Actually it make sense when you think about it. Floppy's were the format of choice at the time, a format that even at that time was already starting to get outdated. And hard drives as we know them today would not be able to store the audio because of their size limitations. A HDD at the time not only costed a whopping $3000 plus, but were also a whopping 10MB. Yes, 10MB as in MegaByte, a single track on Zoolook uncompressed is many times that. Those things just weren't fit for what was being done digitally at the time.feline1973 wrote:Pixar animation isn't really comparable - there you're talking about the actual animation software, all we're talking about here is the recording digital audio onto tape or hard drive, it was nearly always in the same underlying PCM format.
And about the digital audio onto tape, that would in the end be an analog fashion of storing the recording. Having a magnetic tape of those recordings was, and still is with HDD failures, the safest way for keeping it all archived. There's a reason why magnetic tapes are still used a lot, it's a very safe way of storing whatever you put on it if stored properly.
Now I'm not saying that Jarre stores all the original files magnetically. But having the original recordings archived in this fashion makes the most sense for a standpoint in the early 80's.