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5000 Cylinder Recordings Placed Online
Jon Noring writes "The Department of Special Collections at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) Davidson Library recently placed online, with free access, over 5000 sound recordings as part of its Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project. These recordings date from the 1890's to the 1920's, all transfered from Edison cylinders using state-of-the-art equipment. The restorations are first-class, using CEDAR tools. Besides MP3 and streaming audio, the raw transfers are also available for diy'ers to try their own hand at audio restoration. For those who like their music 'hot', there's not much there since most of the cylinders predate the start of the Jazz Era (ca. 1917), but there is some early 'mouldy fygge' dance-type jazz, like 1920's 'Peggy' by Lopez and Hamilton's Kings of Harmony Orchestra."
Oh man, as if having Sony on their asses wasn't enough, these guys are going to bring the wrath of Edison down on themselves!
Well, I guess a recording of this one won't be there...
After watching this video I guess there are 4999 left for them to archive:
http://www.ebaumsworld.com/techtvblooper.html
Friggin hilarious!
The Amberoll cylinders were tough, too. They had to be, to survive repeated mechanical playback, with a stylus pressure of about a pound. So they're much tougher than vinyl records.
There's now optical equipment for reading damaged or fragile cylinders and records. UCSB isn't using it, but it's available for the tough cases.
Some of these recordings are a century old. The original media are still playable. It's sad that we don't have something to transcribe them to that will be playable a century from now. All we can do is hope that someone will recopy the files periodically.
Seriously, though, I've always thought that was an interesting song. Remember that the Wright Brothers flew only in 1903, so the whole concept of "flying machines" was incredibly new and exciting. There's a certain innocent romance to the song that's so... impossible to recapture today.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
From the project site:
"Surrogate files for online distribution were created with Sound Forge 6.0's batch converter (mp3 files) and Cleaner XL (mov files)."
The mp3s/webstreams are for the unwashed masses. The assumption is that the original captures have been retained in a more suitable archival format.
When I was in Niagara On the Lake, or Niagara Falls [I don't remember which], I was in a museum with an Edison player, and a wax cylinder mounted in it. They wouldn't take it off, for fear that it would fall apart, even though they had a few other ones. They started it up for me and my friend, and I kicked myself for not bringing my digital vid. camera with me to record it. The music was over 90 years old, and recorded live! Cool; all those people are dead.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Fortunately, the U.S. Government, via the National Park Service (I believe) are the owners of the Edison masters, and so the recordings appear to be public domain. Or at least the U.S. Government won't attempt to claim state-level copyright on the recordings (which I suppose they could.) Note that sound recordings made before 1972 are NOT covered by Federal Copyright Law, rather they are covered by a patchwork of state copyright laws (both common and statutory), anti-competitive laws, etc. It's a mess. Pre-1972 recordings (other than those whose ownership is lost) will not come under Federal Copyright protection (and thus, hopefully, public domain status) until 2067! There are some early Columbia cylinder recordings from 1890 (technically owned by Sony-BMG) which will not become public domain until 2067, a whopping 177 years after they were 'waxed'.
Marion's Attic radio show is a good source:
http://members.aol.com/marionweb/
I remember when I was a young whippersnapper, I listened to the Sony cylinders and it loaded a rootkit on my Babbage Calculating Machine. It took forever to calculate 12 + 15...that is if the infernal machine wouldn't jump up by itself and crash on the floor.
This is a good example why we need to roll back copyright to a reasonable period of time, or at least require periodic registration and renewal for copyright protection to continue. If they had the copyright laws back then that we have now, these recordings would never see the light of day. There is little or no commercial value to these recordings, but they are a valuable part of our history. It would be a shame to lose them to the ravages of time because of insane copyright laws, like what can (and is happening) to film from 1923 on.
Beware of Sleestak
Note that the original raw transfers (lossless wav) are also downloadable for each song. It would not surprise me (but I have not checked), that the restored version (using CEDAR) in lossless format is also available in the directory of the archive (but there's no public link to it from the discography page.) It's the high-quality transfers that are the most critical to do right, and UCSB did do them right. Save those in lossless format, and they'll always be around for anyone to restore. Algorithms and applications to restore old recording will continue to improve, and these raw transfers can be re-restored at a future time to improve the sound even more.
The velocity of the "needle" across the surface is inherently constant with a cylinder. With a disk the RPMs are constant but it spirals in so you have to compensate for this frequency drift when recording. I wonder how well that worked? I've heard that when cylinders competed with disks they were regarded as having higher fidelity. The reason they failed is eerily similar to the beta vs. VHS debate: cylinders couldn't record as long. Also, if you do the math you find it's much harder to pack the same ammount of surface area into a box of cylinders than it is for disks. So cylinders were more expensive and could hold less music. The difference in quality wasn't enough to overcome that, and disks won.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Here's a good example of content that should be in the public domain. It's really too bad that just about anything newer than the 1920s is still under copyright - Happy Birthday is owned by a division of AOL Time Warner and won't fall into the public domain for another 25 years (unless Congress extends it again).
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Don't be stupid! Of course we didn't rip them just to mp3 format. We copied all cylinders to C-cassettes before destroying the originals.
Actually, in this case, had there been Federal Copyright law applied to sound recordings as it was to other types of creative works (like books), the pre-1923 sound recordings would all be public domain.
But they are not the kind of example you are talking about. It is worse than that! Why? Because pre-1972 American sound recordings are NOT covered by Federal Copyright Law. Yes, you heard me right, Federal copyright law does NOT apply to pre-1972 sound recordings, and according to Title 17 of the U.S. code won't apply until 2067. In the meanwhile, then, sound recordings are covered by a patchwork of state copyright laws (both statutory and common law), plus other mechanisms. The Capitol vs. Naxos case was filed in the State of New York under New York copyright law, for example (Google that for more information).
What does this mean? State copyright laws, by and large, have no limits. So, for example, Columbia cylinders recorded back in 1890 (technically owned today by Sony-BMG) are still copyright protected (at the state level), and won't revert to Federal protection until 2067 (if the copyright terms remain the same as today, all pre-1972 sound recordings will then revert to the Public Domain in 2067). This means that these earliest cylinders will, unless Congress acts, have at least 177 years of copyright protection.
Most of the UCSB collection is from Edison cylinders. Edison is a unique case in that the ownership of the Edison recordings is the U.S. Federal Government (via the National Park Service), and I believe they are not claiming any state copyright protection of them (but they might be able to). So UCSB felt free to go ahead at least with the Edisons. There are a few other early labels whose ownership is totally unknown and likely abandoned, such as the Grey Gull "group" of labels of the 1920's. These are very interesting to transfer as well. There are some really oddball stuff from before World War I, too, that are probably abandoned.
Yes, they could have "stomped" down harder on the CEDAR processor they were using. But the problem they faced is having so many recordings to restore, where the optimum noise-reduction settings for each recording will vary. If you set things wrong, you will remove a lot of the hiss (which usually is more like pink noise rather than white noise, thus a little harder to deal with), but then introduce a lot of annoying artifacts in the sound. Most afficionados of the early sound prefer to hear some hiss than to distort the sound any more than it already is. So long as the hiss is clean and free from pumping), it is acceptable.
The important thing is that the project has placed the original raw transfers online in lossless format, so anyone may restore the recordings themselves. This is a major shift from other early recorded sound archives where the raw transfers are not preserved or made available. As I've noted elsewhere, UCSB has raised the bar in what early sound archives should do.
They'll still be around in another 100 years.
Yeah, but if you ever do lose or damage the wax cylinder, the EULA means you'll have to delete your MP3s as well...
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Since submitting this SlashDot item, I discovered in the cylinder collection an even jazzier recording (from 1924) that some may enjoy: "Why Did you Do It?" by the Georgia Melodians.
By the 1920's, Edison was mastering onto vertical cut disc masters (and issued as "Diamond Discs"), and then producing cylinder masters by dubbing master disc pressings. So the sound quality of the cylinders issued in the 1920's was lower than the comparable discs, such as the above recording. It should be noted that disc records pretty much took over the market by 1915, so by the end of World War I cylinders became almost like the "8-track" of its day. Edison still issued cylinders until it went under in 1929, but the 1920's cylinders are quite rare compared to the Edison discs (as a side note, in 1928 Edison released lateral cut records to play on regular phonographs, and they sounded quite good. Edison was also late to switch to electrical recording, strangely enough.)
Imagine if they had the equivalent of DRM and/or EULAs in the 1900s...
Each cylinder would come with a warning
This cylinder may only be played using a licensed RCA needle. Using any other needle is a violation of the Pony Millenium Rights Act and is a federal offense. By removing this cylinder from its box, you agree to be bound and gagged by the terms of this End-User License agreement. You may not play this music before a publicly audience without expressed written consent of RCA. Within 30 days of purchase, you must write RCA via pony express to "activate" your cylinder. Failure to do so is a violation of this agreeement and is punishable by hanging. After 5 different people have heard playback (or any portion thereof) this cylinder, you might re-activate it by submitting a written request to RCA. Failure to do so is punishable...
Boston Tea Party? Nah. What were they thinking???????????
Even still, it is a shame that these recordings, the largest collection of its type in the world, is being hidden from the public just for what can't possibly be more than a few thousand dollars a year. (You can actually listen to most of the sounds in low resolution streaming on the web, but you can't do analysis at the quality they offer.)
http://flac.sourceforge.net/
Now you can save your time and bullets.
I'll be your candy shop of infinite deliciousity if you'll be my discotheque of endless rump-shaking.
That's a bit misleading. Nobody is massproducing cylinder readers today. I suppose in 50 years you could build a "compact disk" reader.
:-)
Though the longevity of the media is another issue. Keep in mind we are not comparing the same thing in that regard. The density of bits per inch [yes, you could say those analogue recordings are storing "information" and hence can be coded in bits] is FAR less than that of a CD or hard disk.
Let's see a 400GB cylinder made in 1890?
I'm sure it's possible to make a 1MB CD that is HIGHLY redundant [you could do this in software] and likely to last a long time even as pits and scratches form on the media. If you have 650 copies [or 700 or whatever] of the same megabyte on the disk the likelyhood of them all being unreadable [with specialized equipment] is fairly low.
Average 8-track [because I won't be bothered to figure this out for a cylinder but the same point applies] ran at most 60 minutes [or so]. With a dynamic range of about 60dB or so [10-bits] with a freq response bandwidth of about 12Khz [24,000 samples per second] that's 29.29KiB/sec [thereabouts] , say 60KiB/sec for stereo. That's 210.93MiB of storage, at ~3.5ips that's 13500 inches of tape in bands of 1/16th of an inch for a total of 843 in^2 of material or a density of 2,098,943 bits per inch.
A CD can store about 695MiB of data in far less area with a density of about 46 million pits per in^2.
So you're saying something that stores 23 times the information having a lower longevity is a negative quality? It's even worse for a cylinder where the ratio is likely over 100x in favour of CDs [let alone DVDs].
All I'm saying is you can make a DVD or CD have an exteremely long shelf life if you record with pre-1920 densities
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I used to work in Special Collections at UCSB. It's a nice facility and my boss was really cool. (He introduced me to Mogwai and Do Make Say Think.) He was responsible for getting some (all?) of the cylinders being presented online. He really went out of his way, too. Some of the cylinders he got were turn-of-the-century recordings from some middle eastern country (Afghanistan? I forget which). The labels were all in Arabic. It was really neat to see them up close! I got to play with some nice reel-to-reel players too.
The sibling post has it right. There would have been different settings for every cylinder. And the less you process the sound, the less of a chance there is of worsening the distortion. It might sound cleaner, but you might have messed up the signal a little while clearing out the noise. It was for this reason that when we made CDs of our old acrylic and aluminum 78s, the only processing done was to amplify it as much as possible without letting it clip.
I believe the music curator and his staff have transfered their cylinder collection to a lossless format prior to cleaning. I say this not as anyone who knows what the hell I am talking about with regards to the audio processing aspect of this project, but as one of the system admins associated with the Davidson Library at UCSB, where the project is hosted. By the way, the front end is just an old gentoo box, please don't beat it up to bad. I don't want to work on the weekend!
I know the some of the cats that are responsible for this project, and it is entirely a labor of love. They know the subject and have done their damnedest to make sure everything is legal. This is the sort of project that the music industry should laud, and use for favorable pr.
Anthion Thrandocles, Prophet of the Oil
http://www.archive.org/audio/audiolisting-browsear tists.php?collection=78rpm
A lot of these are transfers from the flat Diamond Discs, not the cylinders dubbed from Diamond Discs. Some of those transfers are pretty freakin' amazing. Lots of history here. Hear Irving Berlin sing. Hear why people raved about Enrico Caruso...makes Pavarotti and Domingo sound like punters. Hear Fanny Brice do her schtick. A lot of what is referred to as "Jazz" is actually more like Ragtime. But that can be pretty amazing too.
I came here looking for cartoony music that had passed into the public domain for my upcoming podcast series The Cartoon Geeks. There's lots of it here. Here's the tune that's going to be the theme music. Yowza yowza.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
It makes an interesting read/rant.
Get this -- if you download one of those files and view its ID3v2 info, the "copyright" field says "© 2004 Regents of the University of California".
...
Now, they can't legally claim a new copyright on public domain material unless they've modified the material in a sufficiently creative way for it to qualify as a new "derivative" work. An MP3 doesn't qualify, because there's no creativity involved. This is a bogus claim.
However, given the Creative Commons license on the site's text, the copyright factoids they have in the sidebar, and the fact that this claim would hold up for all of five minutes in court, I'm guessing that this is just a SNAFU.
But it is good for archiving. They would have saved them a bunch of disk space and bandwidth if they would have saved the raw audio as FLAC. Not to mention that you can put some of the song information in the file as tags.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Densities are nothing, it was the physical elegance of the design itself that lended it to longevity. Hard drives store alot of data, but you can't just pick up a few things lying around the house to pull that data off.
I'll never forget the first time I saw a vinyl lp as a child. It was incredible for me to think that with a sewing needle taped to the end of a cone-shaped tunnel of paper, I could clearly hear the recording by spinning the lp and holding the needle in the groove.
It's nostalgic stuff like this that keeps records around (that and DJ's). Vinyl is much more physical and 'real' than a chunk of shiny plastic you throw in a mystery device (cd player) and have music coming out of your speakers. You can SEE how records work. Records were just an extension of Edison's wax (or in some cases metal) cylinders; same principles at work and just about identical mastering methods.
One fascinating fact that's been touched on before is that during WWII vinyl records were used for telephone encryption. An operator on one side of the connection played a specially recorded white noise record while the operator on the other end did the same. Both records were identical and perfectly synchronized. Then, people on either end would start talking. Using analog sound hardware, both operators could subtract the noise and have the voice transmission come through clearly on both ends (realtime post-processing of sorts)..anyone listening in, without the precious 'decoder' records and settings, would hear nothing but noise. Since the white noise recordings were more than just loops, you needed the entire record and not just a 4 second snippet to decode the audio. It may even hold up in this day and age, sort of an audio one-time-key.
Here is some information about Vinyl:
Westrex 45/45 stereo system - Left channel modulates inner groove. - Right channel modulates outer groove. - A mono signal causes lateral only movement
- An out of phase mono signal causes vertical movement.
http://ultrasonicdesigns.com/audio/vinyl/4.JPG
There are 86 square inches of surface on which to cut.
- More Time = More Space
- More Level = More Space
- More Bass = More Space
Space is measured in lines per inch (lpi). This is called the pitch of the lathe.
- This is the number of grooves (lines) per inch of radius. - More Time requires higher lpi - More Level requires lower lpi - More Bass requires lower lower lpi
Pitch = (Run Time x 33.3 rpm)/Radius (3 inches)
- Max Pitch about 300 lpi - Minimum groove width is 1 mil. - Maximum groove width is 6 mils. - Average groove width is 2.5 mils. Gw = [(1000/lpi) + 1] / 2
An increase in lpi should be accompanies by a decrease in depth. An increase in depth should be accompanies by a decrease in lpi.
Pitch and depth (groove width) are controlled by a cutting computer. The pitch must be changed before the loud parts to prevent over cut. A one half revolution delay is required for the preview channel.
The variable pitch control receives right channel information from the preview system so that the pitch can be increased before loud signals that might cut into the previous groove. Left channel information comes from the program system. A difference signal from the preview system is also sometimes provided.
http://ultrasonicdesigns.com/audio/vinyl/5.JPG
The variable depth control receives the difference (left minus right) signal from the preview system.
http://ultrasonicdesigns.com/audio/vinyl/6.JPG
RIAA Curve
1953 RIAA instituted an EQ curve that narrowed the grooves and improved play time.
Boost high freq. 17 dB at 15 kHz and cut the low freq. 17 dB at 50 Hz.
- RIAA pre emphases is automatically added.
- Post emphases is done at the phono pre amp.
- Inner groove distortion causes high frequency loss (scanning loss).
- A compensation system was tried but mostly abandoned.
- Avoid putting bright (sibilant) cuts in this area.
- A low frequency crossover is almost always used to prevent lift out.
- The effect is to move low frequency signals into the center.
- The frequency below which this happens is variable.
- Cutting head is a moving coil device powered by Cutting Amps.
- Cutting stylus is a heated sapphire
- The cut produces a chip that is vacuumed up for safety.
- The Master Lacquer is an aluminum disc covered in lacquer cellulose nitrate.
The cutting console has four channels of everything 2 preview, 2 program. All controls are stepped for resetting purposes. A reference lacquer may be cut to test settings. A Master Lacquer may not be
played. An Eqed Master tape was made for other Mastering Labs.
http://ultrasonicdesigns.com/audio/vinyl/7.JPG
http://ultrasonicdesigns.com/audio/vinyl/8.JPG
http://ultrasonicdesigns.com/audio/vinyl/9.JPG
http://ultrasonicdesigns.com/audio/vinyl/010.JPG
http://ultrasonicdesigns.com/audio/vinyl/011.JPG
Libertas in infinitum