The New MP3.com: 3rd Time a Charm?

macdaddypunk writes "Two weeks ago, CNET unveiled Download.com Music (mistaken by some for the new MP3.com). A week ago, they told the press that the real MP3.com was open for business, yet the site itself still said "coming soon." Today, MP3.com is finally live, and off to a sputtering start. It's a combination of tech articles and a meta-search for major-label downloads. For example, with a single search you can find that 'Abbey Road' by the Beatles is not available for legal download at iTunes, Napster, or anywhere else. The tech content includes such gems as 'how to copy your old vinyl records onto CDs.' The real news is what it does NOT include: no free downloads, and no indie artist community. (As reported earlier, the former MP3.com archive of 1.7 million songs was instead resurrected by another independent music community). The new MP3.com's search results don't even include the 3,500 indie artists from Download.com Music."

Comments

Re:Ummmm

[ajs318]

You don't need to be able to run the turntable at 78rpm. Just play the record at 45rpm and correct the speed digitally. sox is your friend. However, you really need a special stylus to track the fatter grooves of 78rpm records properly; the ones designed for microgroove {45 / 33 rpm} records do not touch both walls, but instead tend to dance about in the bottom of the groove and produce extra noise. On the other hand, the bottom of the groove is more likely to be undamaged {fat needles ride high}, so try it first and see what works.

You will require a sound card with a line input, and a preamplifier with the appropriate equalisation characteristic {for a magnetic pick-up cartridge} or a very high input impedance {for a ceramic cartridge}. Don't even think about using the mic input, even though in this case it doesn't matter about being mono: the equalisation is wrong for magnetic, and the impedance is too low for ceramic. To go from 45 to 78rpm use sox song_at_45.wav song_at_78.wav speed 1.733. Alternatively, if you have a very good sound card which lets you set the sample rate precisely, recording at 25442Hz will give the correct speed when played back at 44100Hz. The cut-off frequency will only be about 12.5kHz this way, but in practice this isn't such a problem as the old recording equipment had less bandwidth anyway.

Note you will almost certainly have to perform some additional low-pass filtering. Read the sox manpage and experiment. A spectrum analyser {hardware or software} will enable you to determine the bandwidth of the signal; anything outside there should be discarded.