Slashdot Mirror
Ripping Vinyl Via Your Scanner?
An anonymous reader writes "This site describes a method of extracting audio off of scanned images of vinyl records. Kazaa vinyl swapping is on it's way!" While this method creates exceptionally noisy samples, you can definitely hear the underlying music.
what more can I say, impressive.
--
WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
Does that exclude Kenny G?
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
A device that can extract 1000 words from a picture?
Silly Rabbit: tricks are for kids.
Serious audiophiles would simply buy a laser turntable to minimize the wear and tear. Although it probably sounds more like a cd than anything.
http://www.elpj.com/
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
But yeah, it's a cool hack.
I seem to recall in the last days of turntables and vinyl records, when CDs were starting to take over, that some company came out with a no-contact record pick-up that bounced light off the grooves. This is sort of a variation on that idea, except you don't need to spin the record.
-- Alastair
Do /. editors actually edit? Probably not the first to notice, but it's spelt Vinyl. V-I-N-Y-L.
Not that hard, folks. Especially when you get it right in the headline.
Matthew G P Coe
http://mgpcoe.blogspot.com/
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Get out the lawyers big bad music companies. There is hell to pay, for this new copyright violating technology.
I can't wait to start ripping my parent's vinyl. I used to listen to it all the time as a kid, and now my Pentium II is finally advanced enough to play 100 year old technology.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
These spelling errors have to stop. No wonder no one takes /. seriously anymore (like they ever did).
Who'd'a'thunk'it? I just checked out the gramophone.mp3 file the guy provided, that's great quality! Hardly any noise and it even picked up some pops and clicks near the end! Kudos to the programmer, it sounded like a vinyl source!
Matthew G P Coe
http://mgpcoe.blogspot.com/
I am releasing no code because it is both sucky and useless (you see, I don't really think swapping scans of old records across p2p networks will become common practice any time soon).
More like he'd rather get his practical joke on slashdot, and if he supplied the code, it'd be a lot easier to prove it's fake.
Let's apply Occam's Razor.
Those music samples could have been generated by software that reads stitched together images of scanned vinyl records.
Or they could be just regular samples of music taken off a record/cd/tape and run through a static-izer for effect.
Which is simpler?
Let's see the code, please...
"And like that
The original author failed to research how vinyl records work, something that "everybody" knew 20 years ago, before CDs.
Now to see if my memory still works. Mono LPs used horizontal modulation; the needle moved back and forth within the groove. Stereo can be viewed two ways. Vertical is difference (L-R), horizontal is sum of the L+R. Viewed differently, the two diagonal walls of the groove are the two channels.
A flatbed scanner can only see the horizontal, so it might work a bit with mono, but it won't work too well! However do note that some very, very expensive ($10k+?) new turntables actually do use optical "needles" to track the groove without touching it. Talk about low tracking force!
ok, so I'm aging myself- but many years ago on "Real People" they had a guy that could recognize an album or song just by looking at the grooves, his specialty was classical, but he knew everything and could easily identify the song just by looking at the grooves. This is basically doing a similar type of thing.
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
The sound is impressive for an off the shelf scanner. I do not know if they exist as a consumer product, but an optical record player would be quite significant. It would preserve the record by not causing physical wear and could likely be made much more sensitive than a needle. A flat bed scanner isn't really they way to go, but it's a definite and very impressive proof of concept.
all know where this is heading. RIAA will have the guy's site down by noon tomorrow.
Definitely multiple DMCA violations, sir. Those grooves DO serve the purpose of encrypting those sounds.
Please stop thinking and trying this silly nonsense. The State will create the most beautiful music for your pleasure. You will be very happy with the State's music. It is good.
Saving an old record collection in a few megs of image files could last a very long time and provide some important historical info. These things are great.
sir bard
Granted its still early, but come on! So the guy messes up spelling. There is way too many high horses that think spelling is all that counts. This is a cool article on something useful to us old farts with an entire collection of Led Zepplin and Jimmy Hendrix records.
| - | - |
Will this work with vinyl too? Seriously, yesterday we ripped into Prince for his 733t-speak, accusing him of continuing the degradation of the English language. Today we post more articles with atrocious misspellings. I can forgive an occasional mistake, but misspelling vinyl as vinile strikes me as more than a minor mistake.
Stop the Slashdot Effect! Don't read the articles!
does it take more bandwidth to send jpgs or mp3s of your record collection? oops i guess jpg and mp3 *both* have ip issues... I got to switch from mp3 to png... ogg is for pussies
I have a Dual direct drive turntable I bought in 1986 with a diamond stylus. It sounds great and I have 'ripped' all my LPs to mp3 a long time ago. Didn't need to stick em in my scanner, didn't need to stitch any images together.
;).
Besides I would not stick any of my 12 maxi singles of 1980s Billy Idol in the scanner to be scraped against the glass.
My NAD stereo has been faithfully updated over the years but the turntable remains the same. And I do use it on the odd occasion and sometimes do pick up an ablum at the flea market.
Puto
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
A quick jump of Google turned up a couple optical record players.
http://www.elpj.com/main.html
Still, it's pretty darn neat to do it with a scanner.
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this is really cool and all, but whats the point, if you really dont care at all about quality then this may be a quick option for converitng your collection, but if you still have vinyl you probabably care enough to plug your turntable into the audio in jack on you computer
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
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while we're on this subject
If you scan it backward, are there satanic messages?
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I can't believe the amount of morons that have fallen for this story yet. The explanations the guy gives are shoddy, and logically it makes no sense.
Not only that, but he's extrapolating a higher amount of data from a smaller amount, and that just does not work people! Listen to that MP3 on his site. That is just a recording of a record playing.. there are no hideous artefacts or giant gaps.. all of which would be expected with such a crazy new idea like this. It reeks of a hoax.
Just because it's not April 1st doesn't mean you haven't been fooled, folks! I have to give the guy credit for trying though.
mogorific carpentry experiments
Is there any proof that this guy actually extracted the audio from a scanned image? I'm sorry, maybe I've gotten too skeptical but I find it hard to believe that this guy made his hack work so well but he fails to provide any technical detail (or code). Please prove me wrong.
::hears x-files theme song::
BEDEMIR: Who are you who are so wise in the ways of science?
ARTHUR: I am Arthur, King of the Britons.
Oh, I'm sure /. will have it down long before that. ;)
Hypothetical Question:
Lets say this is for real (not really sure about that one)
Lets also assume it eventually extracts 100% clear as a bell.
Would it be legal to trade/sell pictures of albums?
Can this be done with computer media? Could you just scan in two halves of a broken cdrom and extract the info? (Or has the NSA been able to do this for years and not told us about it? They just dig the CD shards out of your trash, reassemble the electron micrscope output, and read off the bits.) He said he had to scan the record in multiple sections, so it might not matter if those sections are all attached to each other.
On a related note, is there any technology for using a high res laser scanner to read records? It might actually sound decent.
This code needs to be released. We could use it to read the grooves in Bill and MonkeyMan's heads and tell what they are thinking. Perhaps with the information gained, we can then stop their evil plot to take over the world.
I think, therefore I'm right
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Harry's hair isn't near as blue as Neal's. But I suppose we should really base our opinions on the talent competition and not on appearance.
In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king.
I can rock to some old JPEGs.
I suppose soon some genius is going to find a way to rip CDs with a digital camera, right?
"writing the decoder was very simple. All it did was rotate a "needle" around a given center at some predefined angular velocity" of course! that is so simple!! this guy is acting as though he has some magic program to pull the exact topology of a record out of a digital image. these images are 2D, you need 3D to extract sound. and keeping the "needle" inside the track on the image? very simple...provided you have a time machine in the garage and grabbed some advanced image recognition technology from a few years hence.... how about some valdity checking on /.
that was good fun. here's the high-end deal:
http://metwww.epfl.ch/lecteur_disques/MainLectD
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. . . I thought they were literally using a Milli Vanilli record.
A few years ago i had the idea of something like that, except, a laser record player, using the same concept as a Cd player, you would have lasers scaning the vinyl for side to side movement, along with vertical, and converting to audio, not much modification to existing cd player hardware required, and it would have almost no ware on your records too. Also, a modification of this would be to use depth lasers to generate a 3d model of the record on your computer, you could use software to read the record off the hd, or, using one of thoes nifty plastic makers from 3d models, make a replica of the record as backup
there's a debate that comes up once in a while about backing data to media... The debate is whether the devices to read the data from the media in the distant future will be avaible -- and if not, what the best way to do it. I hear it all the time whenever people do time capsules. I think this list, hoax or not, shows that people will figure out how to decode what ever we come up with -- with today's technology, or tomorrows.
funniest thing i've seen in a while. :)
thx for making my day
i saw this guy on johnny carson who could tell you what record he was holding without looking at the label, only the groove pattern. he could only do classical, but sometimes you hafta specialise.
reminds me also of the trick question "how many grooves on a LP?"
pax out
http://www.finalscratch.com/ This is another cool Vinyl 'hack'. It uses timecoded records to mix mp3s on analog equipment, albeit with a bit of help from a CPU that uses good ole Linux :)
For DJ's just starting out Records are expensive, but this can greatly reduce the cost of starting out.
I love the part where he draws out all these superficially fancy-looking diagrams modelling 3d space but he doesn't bother to even use a compass for his angle drawing/measurements so his record looks like it was drawn by a 3 year old...
just tape whatever vinyl you want to share in your windows (ahem... the glass covered hole in the wall) and let your neighbors take a photo of it and upload it to the pc - however it might make balance control tough if they are not at a 90 degree angle to your window
The best way to remove the noise is to not ADD THE NOISE when you produce your hoax! :). Very clever but this is a big steaming pile of it!
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
obDMCA: rot13 the poly data and call the FBI when the RIAA circumvents it...
Too much time on my hands - Styx
Slashdot is like Playboy: I read it for the articles
Doesn't it make more sense to just set your equipment up so that the output from the record player goes to the input of the soundcard? Record away...
Why would you buy a digital reader if the reason you buy vinyl is because it's fucking analog.
I want to listen to full waves, not stuttered bits of waves.
Granted, there are some old farts who can't let go of the "hiss-pop" of vinyl, but come on. If the process creates a noisy track, who in their right mind would do it? Even the old school vinyl crowd would frown on it if the noise is overpowering.
There's a reason why vinyl was discontinued, folks. Because it just plain old sucks. Too easy to fuck the records up, and there's no "disc doctor" style product to fix that without losing the original etching on the record. Hell with that.
And to the person who submitted this article: Why the hell would you instal KaZaA? Don't you know KaZaA is loaded with Spyware? Or do you like having stuff installed without your knowledge?
Blog Prophyts - Right On, Man
Whenever I try ripping a vinyl, I always get HORRIBLE cracking and popping.
How do you get around that? Don't tell me digital editing either, because that doesn't work too well.
I'm interested in ripping more vinyl's, but I cannot find any decent tutorials anywhere.
...is it even technically possible? Assuming you had a VERY high-resolution scanner AND the mad coding skillz needed to decode the information, is it feasible to get music from the scanned in record grooves? Pardon my ignorance, as always.
hookers and grits.
Do the /. editors actually read /. or know how to use a spell checker? I really don't think so...
C:\>
Scanner manufacturers beware!
agfa, HP, epson, canon, beware...
:)
your scanner now is officially a copyright circumventing device, please upgrade firmware to prevent illegal vinyl scanning or else we will use the DCMA to it's full extent
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
Because:
The "schematics" and diagrams make NO sense, except for perhaps the "sampling" of the bottom.
The algorithm for tracking a groove would be extremly complicated, and probably record specific, depending upon what material is used.
As the tracks get closer, the speed at which the sound is sampled is a greater amount of material over time (unlike in a CD player where the laser goes inside out and the disk speed is varied vie the stepper motor)
How can you tell what frequency to baseline anythign off of?
I doubt there us sufficient resolution by ANY commercial scanner to be able to pick up enough variances in each groove to be able to produce the "good music overlayed with noise" sounds.
I sincerly hope I am completly incorrect, as I am intrigued by the idea, but I simply can't logically deduce that such a thing has been performed by the author.
You have me convinced. Now I will switch to Windows.
Before you "rip" another record, you should know you may be violating sections of the lesser known AMCA (Analog Millenium Copyright Act)...
Look out, here comes Rosen & Co.
But if they would just pass the headline through MS Word once, 95% of the bitching on slashdot would be either silenced or replaced with bitching about using MS Word to check the spelling of the headline. :)
A vinyl LP is 12 inches in diameter, and has a label area in the middle that's about 4 inches in diameter. So the area containing the spiral groove is about 4 inches wide. That's about 10 centimeters. An LP side typically has a little more than 20 minutes of music on it. It rotates at 33 1/3 RPM, so the groove spirals around roughly 667 times. So the width of the groove is roughly .01/667 meters, which is 150 microns. The signal (on a monaural record, stereo is more complicated!) is recorded by wiggling the groove from side to side in that 150 micron space. To reproduce a signal whose dynamic range is 90 dB, the smallest excursions have to be roughly 1/30000 of the maximum amplitude. 150/30000 microns is 5 nanometers.
Think your scanner has that much resolution? Guess again -- 1200 dpi is roughly 21 microns, off by a factor of 100.
Note that 5 nanometers is way smaller than the wavelength of visible light (roughly 750 to 350 nm), so those laser turntables everyone is talking about don't work very well either, unless they've got x-ray lasers in them.
-Tom Duff
I'm tired. s/headline/story/g
...does an interplotation of images to sound produce regular friction noise? (The background noise that has a regular beat to it).
C'mon. There's lots of filters out there that will introduce these types of effects into a sound file.
Hoax.
Standard rotational speed = 33 1/3 RPM
12" record
Circumference = pi * D
33.3RPM /60 ~ 0.5 R/second
12" * pi ~ 37" circumference.
0.5 * 37" = 18.5"
18.5 * 600dpi = 11,100 samples per inch, which gives a Nyquist limit of 5550Hz... a 2400 dpi or better might actually give full audio bandwidth, though in this case, the higher the better, since the area available for sampling decreases towards the center of the record, and for really high fidelity sound, more than 2 samples at 20K are necessary.
His model for how the record was encoded is *wrong*. The RIAA method of stereo modulation (back when they were mostly a standards organization) places the amplitude information on each wall of the V-shaped groove. It is intended to be picked up with a stylus connected to a something in the form of an Y , with channel information picked up by coil or magnet or other means attached to each upper leg of the Y.
Fixing his model should result in drastically improved performance if he's extracting stereo information. Cleaning the record would also help a lot.
His project actually *is* worth doing. An optimized algorithm should allow anyone or a museum with a good scanner to turn his vinyl (SPELLED CORRECTLY) collection into decent quality Red Book or MP3 tracks without any further damage to the records. The basic problem is to linearize the relationship between 16-24 bit gray scale information of reflected light and the depth modulation in each groove.
The suggestion of using software to extract 3D information from the grooves posted elsewhere is a good idea, but this is a good start.
Cool hack.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I think this is a REALLY cool thing... IF it is real. Creator: Release the binary, show us a demo, anything to prove this is true... i'm kinda doubting it.
-=Errors always defy logic.=-
Finally, someone has the balls to stand up for what's right! For too long this horrible affront to spelling and grammar has gone on, unnoticed by countless Slashdot readers!
Thank you, Setzman! Thank you for standing up, karma be damned, for your ideals! It's a shame that no one has ever called them on their spelling and grammar before this!
b.c
Amen, brother man.
That's great!
what a great troll - and i suppose you're also a visual basic "programmer" - two years eh, that makes you seriously 31337 and old school to - i bet i have dust mites with more computer experience
- tensions in our lives that are attacking our minds, unite themselves together to make our consciousness blind - op'ivy
I know this is a fake. Don't get excited about it. :)
My turntables are piped straight in to my studios master mixer, so instead of getting a crappy signal based on an imperfect scan, I can just record the track and use one of about a hundred different pieces of software to denoise the track, though most of my stuff is pretty new and has very little noise anyway. Yeah... great.
The Internet, one place where if you're not right, someone else will set you straight... maybe.
Turntablists have started gluing little handles to the sensor arrays of ordinary flatbed scanners. This could be the biggest new thing since the waa-waa pedal.
Whoever modded this up needs to use some common sense. A record groove that's precise to under 5 nanometers? Sorry, that right there should tell you that this is lacking somewhere. Perhaps some people don't understand that the needle on your record will NOT, no mater how good it is, pick up vibrations caused by a few nanometers of change because that is literally just a handful of atoms!
Now, where the analysis is wrong is a tougher question for me. I'm guessing, however, that it has something to do with the fact that the author assumes that the info isn't encoded on a logarithmic scale. You do, after all, have to have a very special amp to use a phonograph.
b.c
I can't wait for the Evil RIAA to outlaw scanners!!
visual basic is the best. you can create excellent programs in no time at all. the most 1337 programmers use it all the time. use it, and you will see how 1337 it is.
Now if there was a way to scan in a 8-track tape??
Perhaps this guy could put the code on floppy disk, photocopy it and fax it in.
Or scan the floppy the same way as he scanned the LPs and email the jpg.
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
It's time to call for an official Slashdot poll! Is this article a: hoax bad *ss hack microcosmic example of corporate hype
The RIAA is already all over this guy.
Would cleaning it be a DMCA violation? :)
Join the TWIT army now!
OK, looks like the "vinile" misspelling was silently fixed. Now how about changing "it's" to the proper "its"?
Does anybody recall any details about the guy who, some years ago, claimed to be able to look at a vinyl LP and determine, by looking at the density of the grooves, pattern of reflected light, etc, what the recorded music on the disc is?
Much of microscopy work, which this is, involves fooling with the illumination direction vs. the viewing direction. Getting that right is a big part of doing it at all. This guy had to scan the record in four quadrants to get some halfway reasonable result. Obviously, you'd like a rotational scan, like a turntable with a stationary scan arm. The amusing thing is that you could read an entire vinyl record in one rev. Now, at last, the 1000x LP player!
Incidentally, the recording system for stereo LPs is called "45-45 Westrex", because there are two perpendicular tracks recorded 90 degrees apart (at +45 and -45 from vertical). Mono records, which have no vertical component, are thus backwards compatible. If all you can read is the horizontal component, you get a valid mono signal.
I have one that has three grooves on one side. Can't remember the LP's title since it's boxed up someplace, but the artists were Gion Giorno, William S Burroughs and Laurie Anderson, each who had their own 'groove'. You never knew what you'd be listening to when you put the disc on.
The service gal asks Random J. Screwloose to "please send a copy of your disk" and the dope sends her a photocopy.
...only outlaws will have scanners.
then what'll we use to protect ourselves?
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
I know I am being dense, but I have a machine that rotates these vinyl disks at a fixed rate. It has a stylus that fits into the groove on the surface of this artifact, and you can hear the music with an amazing clarity. This idea of optically scanning the surface is fascinating but I prefer the old fashioned way of doing things. The main problem is that this machine just destroys the CD disks that are all the rage now.
Stupid Humans.....
"So the width of the groove is roughly .01/667 meters, which is 150 microns."
.1/667, but it's still 150 microns.
Well, you meant to say
"To reproduce a signal whose dynamic range is 90 dB, the smallest excursions have to be roughly 1/30000 of the maximum amplitude. 150/30000 microns is 5 nanometers."
First of all, the system isn't linear. Think about the sizes you're talking about. And 90dB?
But there's a more important issue: your complaint here would make sense if the software was tracking the groove movement by pattern recognition. But that's not what was suggested here; it's using the light levels along the grooves in the scans to estimate the surface angle and extrapolate the position. All the picture we need for that is a view a few pixels across on the groove. Of course, there still could be an issue with the lack of intensity resolution on the scanner... But since even my entry-level $130 Canon can do 36-bit colour optically (presumably yielding a 12-bit greyscale), you might just be able to shop your way round it.
Why, do you miss Disco that much?
Stupid Humans.....
Emerson Lake and Palmer
Now there was some good vinyl.
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
recording audio tapes off of the C= 64's datasette :)
:)
I think it was like 2-bit (no pun intended) audio. You could hear the music there as well, but you couldn't do anything like rock...it would just become noise. But, "spoken word" recordings were ok. I remembered having a disc that contained "historical recordings" (JFK, Nixon, etc). If you didn't expect too much, it was actually kind of fun
But my question is, how does this guy ever expect us to belive that these recordings were done in the method decribed if he won't release the code...
Actually I always thought it stood for "Spelling Is Correct"-- as in, the spelling you see here is the actual spelling used by whomever is being being quoted.
Ie, spelling is accurately quoted.
Dude ---
That was a much better troll.
if Perl and visual basic got in a fight, Perl would kick visual basic's ass
A vinyl record has a label of typically 3 to 4 inches, and it is safe to assume the groves are 4 inches on either side. At 1200 dpi, this corresponds to 4800 dpi. A record that runs for 22 minutes has 720 groves across a given radius, and therefore a grove is 4800/720 or 6.66 pixels per grove.
In the course of a minute, the record rotates 33 1/3 revolutions, or 12,000 degrees. This is 200 revolutions per second, or 12' per millisecond.
On a circle of radius 2400 dots, one millisecond corresponds to 8.375 pixels. Typically, it's closer to 24 pixels.
So, what you are essentially looking at is 24*6.66 = 160 pixels per millisecond at the minimum, and an average closer to twice this.
While one can not expect to get cd-quality audio from such a processing, it is well within the realm of possibility to produce something at 9kHz, similar to the old AM radio quality.
Certianly LP manufacturing has come a long way. The technology to make high quality 33 1/3 appeared around 1947. Before that the 45 and 78 dominated, and low quality 16 2/3 rpm. Microgrove stereo technologies appeared around the 1960s, and towards the end of the seventies and early eighties, there was some optical pickups.
Dollar for dollar, the LP still sounds better than the cdrom, purely because the digital noise, while not audible, provides a harsh overtone when compared to the vinyl.
On the other hand, with a bit of practice, one can follow the music by looking at the wriggles on the grove. I know I could identify music from the grooves.
The other trouble is that shading and colour carries information as well. So while there are 160 pixels per second, there may well be more information when colour is added into the picture.
Given that his audio samples are consistant with the calculated data information to be found.
So the stuff lines up pretty well, I should imagine.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
...makes the sound really stand out!
cmon.
1. use any receiver with a turntable input to impedence match
2. use a tape deck input to record the signal.
3. digitize it via any pc soundcard line-in.
However, allowing the Billy Idol LP's to get scratched up by the glass could really only have a positive effect!
But with JPEG (or any other compressed image format) you'd loose sound quality to compression, and since none of them (as far as I know) are optimized for audio, you'd need a huge file to preserve the quality... guess we'll see stuff like JPEG-pro and OGGG (OGG Graphics) if/when this technology hits;)
Hey, has anybody tried disabling the light tube on a flatbet scanner and using some alternative light source mounted at an angle? I don't mean necessarily to scan a vinyl record, just in general on interesting surfaces. Skin, cloth, paper, bark, I don't know. If I can find a working scanner to rip apart I will give it a try and report back.
Oh, uh, I mean, I DID do that, yeah I did it already. Last week. It was easy because I'm a genius. But uhhh, I'm not releasing any pictures because they're lame and nobody would be interested in swapping them on Kazaa.
Seriously, has it been done?
I have old caruso albums damaged (cracked right down the middle on most) in a move. This idea would permit me to possibly save the audio on them.. hoax or not, I'm going to try and get something out of them.
Uh, no.
INTERCAL is the best. It actually lets you finish programs in negative time.
Let's see you finish projects that needed to be done yesterday with Visual Basic! It's impossible, because you can only do it with INTERCAL!
I remember this guy who was on a Saturday night TV show in England back in the 80s (it was a show hosted by a magician... my memory has been fried by years of guinness so I can remember his name... Paul something I think) who litterally could look at any vinyl classical record and tell you what it was. His photographic memory along with the patterns that a vinyl disk would make under intence light was what allowed him to freak me out at the tender age of 8.
if Perl and visual basic got in a fight, Perl would kick visual basic's ass
Yeah? Well Triangle Man would swoop in and kick both their asses.
Just slightly curious, but where in the hell did this come from? I'm reading about this vinyl-ripping-scanner-thing and out comes this Win-Troll thread.
By the by, if you recompiled the kernel for a browser then you have a *very* peculiar set up. I've never had to do any such thing and that's ranging from a name brand machine for my mom to a server I slapped together from scrap and the cheapest stuff I could come find.
And if Linux is so lame, why can I use WineX and run Black and White when Windows 2000 on the same machine running DirectX with fully supported drivers doesn't work? I called tech support and after some back and forth they just offered to give me a sealed, shrink wrap copy so I could exchange it at a retailer because they had no more fixes to offer me.
I just found out there's no such thing as the real world. It's just a lie you've got to rise above. - John Mayer
If you look at (some of the better) scans, you can clearly see a bright wavery line on every track. Then just make the SW follow the track (find white pixel, look for another white pixel in a certain direction, repeat), and when you've followed the edge one turn (or a few), you can calculate the center from the average distances of diametrally opposite tracks, and then the audio qould just be a function of the distance to the center (compensate for the spiral shape of course). Of course it would produce sucky mono sound, but nobody said it wouldn't. This method would not be very reliable if it hit dust or scratches, maybe you could just do a few turns and then calculate the rest of the path the pickup must follow from the center and track distance derived from the first few turns (w. compensation for changes like the wide spirals between songs).
The reason people use LP's is because they prefer analog reproduction, instead of the (down) sampling done by the digital format. These guys clean their power so it's perfect sine waves and then use vacuum tubes to amplify thhe signal. I've listened to one rig like this and I have to admit that it sounded pretty darn good. What's the point of doing a crappy scan of an LP if you're going to digitize the picture, mangle it through a bunch of filters and try and reproduce the sound.
I'm still not convinced that you can get decent sound out of a 1200 dpi scan of the LP. You'll only get two or three 32bit dots on the actual track. track speed of 9-18" per second, at 1200 dpi and you get 16800 x 3 dots, or about 50k dots per second. 60 Mega pixels of really really noisy, hard to work with information.
BTW, the ELPJ's laser turntable claims to be completely analog. If it were digital, they'd probably lose 70% of their market. After, the reason you have LP's is because you want the analog sound.
EnkiduEOT
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
-Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
Place a dark blue overlay of some sort on the scanner bed, and then place the record over that. Or scan it the normal way, open up the gimp, and get the deepest blue you can.
:)
The shorter wavelenghts should penetrate deeper into the grooves and pits. The longer wavelengths that don't fit into the terrain will scatter, and produce interference effects and such.
Is this worthy of an upward moderation? I don't moderated up very often anymore, and it's kind of a bummer being down below the noise where noone can see the words one has carefully put together.
ps:
If you get a speeding ticket during these zero tolerence roundups, FIGHT IT! It feels good to finally understand some of the processes that go on behind the scenes. Makes all the pomp and circumstance the police blast you with come into focus in entirely different perspective.
I found out that the hostile cop that pulled me over didi the radar thing on me while he was sitting behind a speed limit sign that was hidden by a bunch of bushes. And he was doing this on zero tolerence weekend to boot. AND the road appears to have been illegally zoned for years, so the speed limit could be suppressed to below what Illinois law stipulates. AND he was using his radar gun about two blocks away from a 2,000,000 watt televison station. How dare these clowns demand that we toe the line to "zero tolerence" perfection when they're behaving like a bunch of neurotic little kids. It blew my mind.
If they try to pull that zero tolerence shit on you, document everything that happened, have a walk around a good portion of the road with your digital camera.
Stuff to get:
Vehicle code for your state.
road survey data from department of transportation
What zoning does the road have, urban or residential? Lots of States have become wise to the cops refusal to obey the laws and have enacted provisions for illegal speed traps in response. Other limitations too. Cops writing too many tickets appears to be a growing problem and people are catching on to the game.
Hint, when you try to read the vehicle code onilne, the interface will probably suck. You'll be pulling your hair out, so I recommend wgetting the whole thing and using grep to dig with. Don't
forget the -np option for wget, or you'll be downloading the whole states website! Study the wget manpage carefully before proceeding!
Once you get it downloaded, a quick way to get to the meat of the things is with a bit of grep:
-A lines of text above target word
-B lines of text below target word
-r recurse directories
-s suppress errors
-h don't display the filename of the results
grep -A20 -B20 -rish 'officer' *|grep -A4 -B4 -i 'may not'|less
or
grep -A20 -B20 -rish 'officer' *|grep -A4 -B4 -i 'admiss'|less
get the drift? After about 10 minutes you'll be flying through that shit. Give it a shot. It's so easy, you'll find it almost entertaining.
Anyway.....why did I write this crazy rant. I've had it with the whole corrupt speeding ticket issue and every unfair ticket they write for me,
will result in a thousand people I help with their tickets.
We don't have to take this shit. Read your laws, it will be awkward at first but your eyes and brain will adjust. When the police don't follow the laws, you have to learn how to defend yourself in court. Welcome to America in the year 2002. Good luck, and I am sure you will discover legal research qualities in yourself that you never possed. sorry about the madness, I've been up for most of three days digging through this legal stuff and I just couldn't stop once I got rolling.
Software project..database containing all the info needed to fight unjust tickets in every city in the nation. That would make them rethink this zero tolerence madness. Anyway, time for bed and to get away from this stuff before it drives me truly insane.
Rule of Law Means For EVERYONE!
Thank you for your assistance in Slashdotting the site referenced in your article. Your actions are no longer required as it is now being DOS'd by the RIAA due to suspicion of copyright infringement.
We have also detected the files: gramophone3.mp3, dneedle1.wav, dneedle2.wav, and dneedle3.wav on Kazaa and are taking appropriate action to shut down Kazaa or, failing that, the Internet.
Furthermore, we shall be prosecuting the site owner under the DMCA for using a scanner to bypass the "Grooves Encoded for Diamond Needle Recovery Only" copy protection mechanism (Cactus Data Shield, version 0.1 beta). Slashdot.com is also being investigated for ancillary violations of the DMCA by providing a link to the illegal information.
Please remember that only outlaws digitally process music.
Yours lovingly,
Hilary Rosen
Chief Enforcer, RIAA
Well put my good man, well put!
More like 20,000, numbnuts.
You have already proved that you suck.
Before people start getting all excited about how this will help revolutionize the redistribution of historical vinyl recordings, please note that there already are players available that use optical readers instead of needles to get the audio off the record. They were horribly expensive 10 years ago, and I imagine the price is worse now that demand has plummeted.
Amusing, yes. Revolutionary, no. This project rates about on par with the guy who built a DAT changer with a couple of Lego Mindstorms kits.
Penis atoms, to be precise.
Odd, I've never had to recompile my kernel in the 2 years I've been using linux. You know what that means? YOU ARE A TROLL! And you're offtopic.
The point is that newspaper editors correct grammatical and spelling mistakes that reporters make. They ought to correct such errors in other communications that are relayed to the paper, unless the error itself is the subject of the article.
This is a matter of common decency, no more nor less.
yeah, I agree that it'd be cool to do with a scanner, but, would one last play from a record player into the computer to convert to mp3 kill a guy and his record collection? I Doubt it.. .kb
Two Wrongs Don't Make A Right-- But They Make Me Feel A Whole Lot Better
Several people have mentioned the ELP laser phonograph that costs like $10k. There are some plans and kits available on the net for those laser listening devices that you point at a window to hear conversations inside. I wonder if one of these could be modified to read LP's. You'd likely have to get a more focused beam, and you'd need a couple of them to get stereo sound, but it might be a cool project.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
Actually, closed loop records (the kind that djs will use to play a continuous sample) can have tons and tons of seperate grooves. Friend of mine has 2 2x12 sets which each have 100 grooves each. I've also got multi-track records that have multiple grooves, for instance Younger Brother's the finger/Even dwarves start small. The weird thing about the Dwarves side, is that the inner track spirals in, and the outer track spirals out. Very strange.
There are lives at stake here!
He just mixed it up, you know, being used to windows, where the browser is part of the OS...
The numbers are easy enough to calculate, but nobody else bothered to post any calculations. However, a lot of people were convinced that thing was a hoax without any visible calculations. This doesn't mean it isn't a hoax, but it does make it a lot less likely. Doing it is a lot more classy than just posting a hoax, isn't it (he says hopefully, but not with any real conviction)...
And William of Occam is gonna be well pissed when he finds out what someone's been doing with his razor.
I couldn't agree on your comment more in regards to the usefullness of WIndowsXP and Visual Basic. My favorite component is the MEDIA PLAYER! Windows Media Player 9 is the single most important entertainment release ever. It is so important that I have flown to LA for the unveiling and am now thinking of deploying the beta of this fine offering into production on all of the workstations and servers throughout our organization. As I watched BillG demo the new product, I thought of all the ways this new Media Player will improve our business. I routinely allow my employees 30 minutes a day for entertainment and am pushing out the new Media Player through a Group Policy right now. I have contacted my MS sales rep with the official "go live" word and he has rejoiced and sent me a shirt. I take great solace in the fact that Microsoft offers my firm everything, from ROCK SOLID and secure offering like Windows 2000 to Media Players.
http://saveie6.com/
Here we go again. A very minor flaw and the ABMers go crazy.
.NET and Trustworty Computing are around the corner.
Come on folks
Since I do know what these things are, I'm doing a bit of research which I'll be posting to the main thread shortly for the next person who wants to try this.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Enjoy
Now we can have jpeg-mutilation on vinyls as well :)
http://arts.ucsc.edu/ems/music/tech_background/TE- 19/teces_19.html contains basic information on how the LP record works. I think the most important thing for the experimenter is called RIAA equalization, in order to limit the physical motion of the recording stylus that cut the record, bass was reduced and treble increased in a very precise way, in order to reproduce the original sound, the opposite must be done.
The RIAA equalization curve is a plot of amplitude boost/cut vs. frequency. Apply its inverse to the raw analog signal(s) that come out of your signal processing.
You can find it at http://www.tanker.se/lidstrom/riaa.htm.
Oh, and CLEAN THE RECORD BEFORE DOING THIS. The info in Part 14 of the rec.audio.* FAQ is as good a place to start to find out how as any.
Have fun and feel free to let me know if you get anywhere.
You might also want a look at my other post to this thread.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I think you'll find that's steganography.
Oh wait, there's a knock at my door. BRB.
Of course, if you're using DSP, the equation is a better place to start, just remember, it was recorded using treble boost, bass cut, playback is the opposite.
Tech Public Policy stuff
can I scratch with it ?
Some clarifications:
I am sorry so many of you thought this page was a hoax only
because no source code was supplied (I'm sure you'll all agree, now that
you can see the code, that it is both straightforward and crappy).
I guess I didn't do enough on the actual explanation side either.
The whole thing was done in a couple of late nights so I didn't really
have much time to gather all the technical details concerning phonograph
modulations. Moreover the "archeological" reverse-engineering aspect was part
of the fun.
I now know (thanks to some great replies) that the horizontal modulation (the only
one I did decode) is not a whole channel in itself but merely a delta between
the h-modulation and the depth-modulation which I did _not_ decode.
Some repliers seemed to be a tad confused as to what recordings were
the actual decodings. I'd like to stress that gramophone3.mp3 is a recording
while the rest (dneedle*) were decoded from the image.
Have fun,
Ofer Springer
Yes, switching off the under-the-glass light source is very easy in groovy modern scanners which have transparency scanning capabilities.
These scanners (good for negatives and slides) obviously can't be lit from below, they have to be lit from above. They come with a light-box attachment which normally is powered from the scanner unit and can be switched on to replace the underlighting.
vinyl = prevention of creation of exact copies by forcing an analog data path. thus, it is a copy protection mechanism, and this overcomes this mechanism, thus violating the DMCA.
I'm sure that the major labels will be embracing this new protection mechanism with fervour.
"I think it would be a good idea" Gandhi, on Western Civilisation
Well done for releasing the code.
Regardless of how crappy you think it is (oh, and I'm sure it is) at least people can try it for themselves now and put aside their fears that they've been hoaxed.
How easy was it to stitch the 4 quandrants of the record together? What did you use?
By my quick-and-dirty calculations, todays's large-format high-definition photo materials just might have enough resolution to enable us take a snapshot of a cd surface and later scan it and burn our own cd from "cd image" ;-) Lots of technical problems, but solvable, I'm sure. Has anyone heard of such a device?
I can already image someone sneaking into record store, taking a quick under-hand shot of cd of his favourite artist, crying "Got it!" and bolting away, chased by a security guard. Lots of other fun possibilities, too ;-) Too bad the RIAA will outlaw photo cameras shortly after that..
In response to doubtful Slashdotter's, it looks like the author has posted his code. It really is sucky. Only two comments in the whole program.
...but pretty darn cool, nonetheless.
This morning Senator Hollings introduced legislation to "plug the analog hole". Scanners, cameras, microcopes, and all other optical devices will be required to contain a DRM chip to disable the device.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Could we apply this to maps and play Mother Natures Grand (Canyon) tunes from the 70's? Even better use the latest Mars satalite data!
/. story) with Chaos Theory (Google James Glick and Chaos Theory for a good overview) predict earth quake's by analizing comparisons of the musical scores of geographic fault lines taken at different times.
Or combining knowledge from musical programming code debugging (previous
NOW he has released his source.
He is taking the average of amplituth of a x-y value he calculated (white = high(255), black is low value(0)). This is not the perfect method of decoding it, But it add's anonther factor 256. It is not black and width images,
this and the 60 Db factor makes it more feasable.
That's gotta be one of the more clever puns I've seen on /. in a while. Kudos.
Folks: it's not "it's". That means "it is". Good christ folks, learn the basics of grammar.
it was about $200. read the record with a laser. I thnk it could playt both sides without flipping the record.
...is to take one of those Yamaha Tr@c2 CD burners than can burn pictures and text onto the data side of a CD and burn the picture of the vinyl record onto it!
It would be a digital image of an analog recording, that could be played on neither a CD player nor a record player.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
These guys have a 3D scanner that would do the trick
I do this alot because I DJ and would like to hear the tracks I buy at work or in the car etc. etc. Basically what you do is take your turntable and plug it into your receiver, then plug that into your computer. (you are gonna wanna make sure you have a good sound card and good stylus) Use a program like soundforge and record them. You can get rid of the crackle with the vinyl tool and clip it to the right time. It's time consuming but OH SO worth it if you really love listening to your vinyl collection.
-- I am baseball in Minnesota.
1 centimeter = 0.01 meter
10 centimeters = 0.1 meters
also, i doubt the excursions in grooves in lps are accurate to 1 part in 30,000
Unless you have very small hands, when you said "literally a hanful of atoms" you were incorrect.
My hands can hold quite a large number of atoms.
I do not think the word "literally" means what you think it means.
The city is being overrun by a herd of Lucy Liu's.
Another technical brain who thinks "it's" is possessive. Why can't the people who submit stories to /. proofread before hitting the [Submit] button?
Clean your records first, before scanning them. Unlike conventional playback methods, optical methods are completely thrown off by dust. While you're at it, clean your scanner glass as well, even if it looks clean, it probably isn't :-).
:-)
The problem for me is that a lot of my collectable vinyl is pressed in coloured, or transparent vinyl, or is in the form of picture discs. That's going to same some serious modifications to the program to read.
What would be really interesting would be reading a laserdisc with my scanner
The Laser Turntable works as well as can be expected. I have done many tests and comparative listening sessions as well as transfers (OK, to digital) pitching the Laser Turntable against a very typical high-end analog playback setup (Linn Sondek LP-12 with Koetsu Rosewood cartridge) as well as against the original master source in digital form, and can honestly say that the LT comes up as the winner time and time again!!!
Especially in the case of records where the master tapes were lost or destroyed, this will be the closest you can get to achieving getting back to the original sound, and therefore invaluable in restoration work to be able to extract the most precise and accurate musical information back from the record's grooves. A good example of this is Jamaican Reggae Dub records, which sometimes were cut directly to the lathe (no tape). The 45 rpm disc becomes the master tape (!) and reading it back with a Laser Turntable brings you that much closer to the source.
For anyone who may care, transferring from the LT to a 24-bit workstation and then cleaning up the resulting audio files with hiss and click-removal software yields astonishing results, which as previously mentioned can function as a reasonable substitute for a master recording when the original has been lost....
This device takes a bit getting used to, and is by no means for the faint of heart, but if you have a real taste for music that is not available on CD or just a plain analog fiend, I am still wondering why this item is not more popular. As an example I never see it listed in any of the Hi-Fi magazines and such....(maybe they don't advertise)
The scanner trick that was originally mentioned here is quite clever, and basically works around the same principle of decoding the information on the record's groove, but is definitely a beautiful lo-tech variation on the same theme.
The projectors of the 1940's and beyond used optical waveforms on the side of the film to reform an analog sound signal during playback, was used on cinema technology up until the early 70s as I recall..u re.html
http://history.acusd.edu/gen/recording/motionpict
Has information on the original technology.
So pulling the signal off vinyl probably can be done with some level of precision.
Jim.
-- If at first you don't succeed, lie!
My boy needs to rip the new Gouryella shite like so cuz they are bogarting it only on white-label vinyl!
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
1) LPs have features with 0.001 mil resolution (that's 1/1000000th of an inch). Source: Encyclopedia Brittanica, Vol 17, p772Fd, 1962 edition. Got a 10 MILLION DPI scanner? (UW-SCSI for reasonable scan times, I guess.)
2) Got a scanner with a 12x12 inch platen?
3) As a previous poster stated, stereo grooves are recorded with 90 degree quadrature, ie there's a horizontal and a vertical (depth) component.
4) LPs are far more complex than CDs to figure out. CDs are almost child-like in comparison.
5) For the fucking BILLIONTH TIME, it's spelled D-E-F-I-N-I-T-E-L-Y.
6) Why is it I can post nonsense for days and not get blocked, I make ONE stupid Goatse joke, and I'm banned?
Due to excessive bad posting from this IP or Subnet, comment posting has temporarily been disabled. If it's you, consider this a chance to sit in the timeout corner. If it's someone else, this is a chance to hunt them down. If you think this is unfair, please email jamie@slashdot.org with your MD5'd IPID and SubnetID, which are "" and "".
places the band into an unforgiving contract that forces them into servitude and then gouges the consumer in the stores. Geez man where did you get your info?
Oh and BTW way you can't get a 5:Informative for mentioning the RIAA in a semi positive way--THIS IS SLASHDOT MAN!
A CD has 44k samples per second. That means to reproduce a 15k sound, there are only 3 samples per wave. With only 3 samples, there is NO difference between a sine wave, a square wave, or a sawtooth wave.
Even a 10k tone has only 3 samples per wave.
With a good enough stereo you CAN hear the distortion produced by digital sound's aliasing. Just about any ear can hear it, provided the electronics are good enough.
The aliasing distortion is particularly troubling in passages with several very high frequencies modulated together, like the highest notes on a piano mixed with symbols, mixed with the higher notes on a long neck guitar.
-steve
thefragfest.com
(I wish I could afford to be an audiophile!)
I'm already ripping vinyl. Only you don't RIP vinyl, you SAMPLE vinyl.
If you sample Led Zepplin's "Presence" album (assuming you have a good, little used one) and burn it to CD, the burned CD will sound BETTER than the factory CD, because they did a REAL shitty job remastering it.
I wish they'd quit remastering old music, they should just sample the original masters.
-steve
thefragfest.com
Big props.
Stay away from my record collection.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
0 n0!!!!
/. 4nd w33l b3 m0r3 p0pul4r3 &&& l33373r!!!!!!
th3y sp3l3d it rong!!!
th3y R n0t l337!!!!!!
l37's s74rt r 0wn v3rs10n 0f
(yes, I am being sarcastic, I'm English =)
Wow - they were manufacturing products with 5 nanometer tolerances 40 years ago? Holy freaking wow, did you fly back in time and show them how to do it?
Amazing. And these laser turntables - they don't work? We should probably let the company know this and also the people who've bought them.
if you do it on your own dime, it can be as useless as you'd like.
here, and the author has updated his site and made an apology...start checkin'! :)
you know what i would love to see?
.WAV into a vinyl track image.
.WAV, you have to deal with tracking, noise, all that. but going to .PNG, you can have all the clarity you want. it's merely dependent on how large (hi-resolution) you want the image to be.
:)
i would love to see reverse compatibility. even MORE useless hack, this would convert a
i think it would work a lot better, really. the computer can produce a much clearer image than a scanner can RE-produce.
in theory, it would be relatively simple, once you know how the audio is "encrypted" in each method. see, in converting to
even if it were a gimp script, it would be really, really awesome. (and yes, completely useless
then again, a bunch of people were talking about laser turntables. presumably the laser just reads the visual data? so a printed image would probably work well. possibly even be optimal.
Is this what the image scanning does? I'm just sure that slashdot lot must have heard of the imic.
Bwahahaha!!!! Nice one. MOD UP, it's funny!!!
with pitch control, a jog wheel, and a bunch of cue up buttons. this is why i like mixing cd's on my cdj's. gimme records i can treat like cd's. please!
i have a cat named george. RAWR!
I want to rip my LPs using a laser mouse :-P.
Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF
People rip vinyl all the time, I admit that ripping from an image is a cool idea... but... everyone else just gets the output from their turntable, records the song, and then converts to mp3. No image quality issues, and the pops can be taken out in .wav format before the mp3 conversion. Takes a little while, but people do it all the time.
Make sure that you remind some of the youngsters here about what you mean by "vinyl". Some of them may not know.
my friend is doing this for his thesis , except hes using a digital camera , and the record are old ceramic ones , posibly gramphone? anyway its for a mueseum , to archive old recordings....
It sounds like what you're saying is that it's too difficult to track the groove in the image to extract useful information from it. While a computer can't represent a perfect circle in cartesian coordinates, it can come arbitrarily close. I don't know what lengths this guy's program goes to, but if you have the whole record image, or component parts of it (and if you're doing it right it's probably better to have the computer assemble the component parts), you can do a least squares (or better) fit of a parametric eqation for the spiral groove. You can do this to nearly arbitrary accuracy- the scan resolution will be the limiting factor. So, there's no theoretical problem with determining where the groove should be and where it actually is and determining the sound from that. Technically, though.....
What I don't understand is why you can't just link a record player into the line in on your computer, and use musicmatch or some other recording program to rip vinyl? It seems implicitly easier and one heck of a lot more accurate.
Of course if this technique ever caught on you would end up with the high end audio voodoo magazines including scanner reviews along with their reviews of turntables and tube amps. I can see it now...
Yes, the HP 6350C had a warmer sound than the Canon scanner, but the Canon bought a certain joie de vrie to the reproduction that the HP couldn't match. Played through a Pentium 4 connected to a set of Mark Levinson tube amps and Quad Electrostatics the Canon brought a new life to old recordings
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
The real answer is "it depends", and "however many you want".
Tool's album Opiate has 2 grooves on one side and one on the other. So in that case 3.
One of the disks of Alice in Chains double ablum "Jar of Flies/Sap" only has one groove on one side, and a carved picture on the other. So in this case 1 is indeed the correct answer.
Blah. Blah. Blah.
this is an excellent idea. embodies the essence of a true hack. a while ago i was thinking of doing this sort of thing only with CDs. the only problem would be if the scanner wasn't up to the dpi necessary. come to think of it, if we get a scanner to scan a cd at a high enough dpi and use a program like this to create wavs or an iso file, then we could get around the "crippled cd copy protection" measures that inhibit the playing of particular cds in some cdrom drives.
Actually, vinyl records have long outlasted any image file format to date. I can still play the 78s from 1919, but all those C64 game graphics i worked on as a kid in 1983 are just memories.