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.
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/
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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.
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.
| - | - |
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
while we're on this subject
If you scan it backward, are there satanic messages?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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 /.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yepps - this cool trick proves that there is absolutely NO way to make a completely "Copyright-protected" recording of any kind. Nomater what you do - people like this witch has so much time to waste can rip them of ;-)
"If you keep an open mind people will throw a lot of garbage in it."
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...
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...
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
...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.
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.
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. :)
Becaues a laser turntable is not a digital reader.
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
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
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.
Hint for the spelling impaired, it's definitely.
"Use Linux! it makes your smart!"
---
SCO is weenies
Gator is Spyware
Microsoft is thugs
elpj.com's Laser Turntable, "Investment" link :
"Pure Analog Sound :
The Laser Turntable does not digitize the signal at any point in the reproduction."
Analogue audio meets the 80's!
adam
--I called my two cats Wax and Wayne.
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
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"?
Nothing of the sort has been proven, fool.
It shouldn't even need to be proven. If I can hear it, I can record it...unless you find a way to digitally encrypt my eardrum(and everyone elses).
But there aren't enough nocturnal midget microsurgeons available to do that either! So case proved, QED.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
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...
unless you find a way to digitally encrypt my eardrum
Two words: "cochlear implant".
-- Alastair
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.
Notice he said "my eardrum," not "someone's eardrum." Even if it means trading off guard duty with friends bearing rifles to keep the thought police away, he's saying that his ear won't ever be encrypted.
Do you know how royally pissed I'd be if I went deaf some day and put up the cash for a DRM restricted cochlear implant? It's bad enough that there's a business of selling people's headspace (advertising).
A solution to the problem with music today
However, allowing the Billy Idol LP's to get scratched up by the glass could really only have a positive effect!
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 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
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
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
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.
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!
Hey man, see my much funnier joke earlier, on the same point. ;-)
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
>Do you refer to my sig? Because I do think it is the most clever I have ever seen.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
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/
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
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
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
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.
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.
Notice he said "my eardrum," not "someone's eardrum." Even if it means trading off guard duty with friends bearing rifles to keep the thought police away, he's saying that his ear won't ever be encrypted.
Good morning mr. i_am_nitrogen,
welcome to chicago hope emergency, you have been hit by a bus, but we managed to rescue you. During the surgery, we noticed that you haven't had a DRM compliant cochlear implant, but fixed this issue for you without any additional cost. Have a nice day..
But there aren't enough nocturnal midget microsurgeons available to do that either!
Perhaps the RIAA could recruit... the Underpants Gnomes!
1. Implant DRM device in everyone's ears
2. ???
3. Profit!
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
Folks: it's not "it's". That means "it is". Good christ folks, learn the basics of grammar.
wow. man. wow.
ok, i can now turn off my computer, quit my job, and wander the country side in solemn contemplation.
i have seen --- everything.
absolutely astounding.
...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!!!
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.
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.
That is hilarious! best thing that ever came out of Slashdot.
---
SCO is weenies
Gator is Spyware
Microsoft is thugs
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.
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!
Big props.
Stay away from my record collection.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
No, it's not that either. Quotation marks implies that you're quoting someone. It should be known, and accepted that when you're quoting someone all the errors are errors made by the person being quoted. And if you're quoting someone who said something in print, I can understand if you put a [sic] after a spelling mistake or a typo. But to put a [sic] after a grammatical error, that's ridiculous. And it's done ALL the time.
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.
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
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.....
Oh, you meant records? Sorry, I was thinking of my couch...
Trees everywhere, and not a forest in sight.
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.
Ever read that book, "The Alliance," by (don't remember who)?
It's a good one.
A solution to the problem with music today
they dont even have to be this insidious...
they just say "fine were selling only DRM cd's that play on DRM ears, dont like it dont buy it"
i honestly dont know what people would decide
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
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.