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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.
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
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.
I take it back. I don't think it's a cool hack, I think it's a cool hoax. WHBT.
Pretty funny write-up, actually, but I'll believe he actually did it when I see the code.
-- Alastair
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 ($10k+?) new turntables actually do use optical "needles" to track the groove without touching it. Talk about low tracking force!
ok, so I'm aging myself- but many years ago on "Real People" they had a guy that could recognize an album or song just by looking at the grooves, his specialty was classical, but he knew everything and could easily identify the song just by looking at the grooves. This is basically doing a similar type of thing.
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
I have a Dual direct drive turntable I bought in 1986 with a diamond stylus. It sounds great and I have 'ripped' all my LPs to mp3 a long time ago. Didn't need to stick em in my scanner, didn't need to stitch any images together.
;).
Besides I would not stick any of my 12 maxi singles of 1980s Billy Idol in the scanner to be scraped against the glass.
My NAD stereo has been faithfully updated over the years but the turntable remains the same. And I do use it on the odd occasion and sometimes do pick up an ablum at the flea market.
Puto
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
No no: Kenny G albums would be vile .
It's latin for "thus". It's placed in brackets after quoting something that sounds wrong or odd to indicate that it really is like that in the original you're quoting (otherwise you might think it's a typo or misprint on the quoter's part). Simple errors are usually fixed instead of being marked with [sic], it's used if something is just bizarre and impossible to correct (like when Dan Quayle says something completely non-sensical) or when you're quoting a published work (fixing typos when quoting a published work is okay, but fixing its grammar is generally a bad idea).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
If you scan it backward, are there satanic messages?
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
No, of course not.
MP3s are not like-for-like copies of CDs, they're extremely lossy, and you only get a tenth of what's on the CD.. but.. you can still get busted for swapping them! I believe the copyright laws specify that any 'likeness' to which a third-party could associate with the original, is covered as such.
Ditto for music encoded within images, though this is a hoax.
mogorific carpentry experiments
Generally, people deride something like "sic" as "elitist" when they don't want to admit they didn't know what it meant, either (or when they don't want to admit they didn't catch the mistake themselves).
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
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. :)
...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
reminds me also of the trick question "how many grooves on a LP?"
:-) Except for one album, which had three...
:-)
That's two, right? One for each side
(For the skeptical, it was either Monty Python's Matching Tie and Hankerchief, or New World Record. One side had two different starting points, so you would hear one or the other at random. They converged somewhere in the middle of that side, so the second half was the same.)
Now, who around here remember's Flipper's "Brainwash" single?
A dingo ate my sig...
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.
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.
Tool's Opiate EP has a similar thing. There's a bonus track, but you have to put the needle down in the right groove. Pretty cool.
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
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
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
Well, the purpose of language is to communicate. So, yes, it's possible that an over-fixation on grammar could lead to a blockage of communication. But it's just as possible -- and I would say, even more likely -- that everyone striking out on their own and establishing their own "new rules" will lead to linguistic fragmentation and the death of communication. Look at it this way: Try picking up an early but still Modern English text -- something written back before printing presses and dictionaries. Try to read it. Pick up a New York Times article from, say, 100 years ago. Try to read it.
Which of those, do you think, would be more readily comprehensible? And don't you think it might have something to do with the standardized spelling and grammar employed in the Times?
As someone scientifically trained, I am simply aware that non-standard usages can be deadly to communication and the progress of the field.
Finally, I'd like to comment on
Actually, no. Usage of "[sic]" and other correction of grammar does not imply that there is a correct way of speaking. These do imply there is some sort of "correct" way of writing
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach