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Making Old Sound Recordings Audible Again
orgelspieler writes "NPR is running a story on a safe way to reproduce sound from ancient phonographs that would otherwise be unplayable. The system, called IRENE, was installed in the Library of Congress last year. It can be used to replay records that are scratched, worn, broken, or just too fragile to play with a needle. It scans the groves optically and processes them into a sound file at speeds approaching real time. IRENE is great at removing pops and skips, but can add some hiss. Researchers are also working on a 3D model that is better at removing hiss."
Oh wait, never mind...
(but i swear that's what my mind picked up initially!!)
I remember a few years back some guy had some way of using a laser to play the needle; is this the same thing improved?
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
Can anyone find a link to source code for this?
And the National Library of Canada has had one of those units since 1992.
Can add some hiss to what? To the perfect Hi-Fi quality you are expected to get out of a century old phonograph?
Nuffsaid
________
Don't know about his cat, but Schroedinger is definitely dead.
these audio recordings aren't degraded, they just have some sort of ancient DRM on them. many years from now they'll find some ancient music cds of ours with DRM on them and think they are degraded too.
how fidel do you want to be?
OK, so the real quote is "Speed costs money, how fast do you want to go?" and is usually applied to hot rods. The analogy to sound is pretty accurate though.
At some point, you can't just pop a disk or cylinder into a machine and have everything automatic. Expensive people have to get involved. In theory, as long as the signal is there, you can re-construct it in the face of a huge amount of noise. The process is not dissimilar to getting the data off a trashed hard drive. In fact, some reconstructions have noise deliberately added to make them sound more 'authentic' to the listening audience.
I've been a fan of ancient public domain music for a while now. I hope they are kind enough to post these on a website for our listening pleasure.
Give Kashyyyk back to the Wookies
I bet a lot of floridian orange growers do a lot of "grove scanning" as well.
No offense to some of the bright high school students and undergrads who comment here...you're appreciated, sometimes for you're youthful naivety, but appreciated nonetheless.
" Researchers are also working on a 3D model that is better at removing hiss.""
I found your problem. You have a snake trapped in the machine.
As mentioned by the company in the link above, they mention how their laser turntable can scan in groove areas that are undamaged. Nothing new to see here, except claiming previous art as new.
Check this page: http://www.laserturntable.com/about/sound.html
and some guy also tried it years ago with just commercial scanners (http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~springer/), although the results weren't that great, but at least it's a proof of the concept.
I wonder if they can help this guy?
I don't know about the Canadian system, but the Japanese system is different, and if I understand it correctly, much less capable. The Japanese system spins the disk and replaces the mechanical stylus with two lasers, if I read the description correctly. The IRENE system takes a picture of the surface and reconstructs the groove pattern from the image. The record surface does not move. This is why IRENE can scan a record even if it is broken. In the NPR article, they describe how they input an old recording that had a broken section. They just fit the two pieces together and scanned the surface. IRENE can also scan cylinders as well as disks, which the Japanese system cannot do for mechanical reasons.
Well at least ArchieBunker lived up to his pseudonym: ignorant and proud of it. When you are incapable of reading and understanding an article, I guess you have to compensate by trying to demean creative people who do worthwhile work. Instead of yawning, Archie should stay off Slashdot and go back to watching reruns of old TV shows, where no mental activity is required.
Has surfing the internet made you so jaded? "I read about a technology years ago that is not in the least related to the story, might I show my world weariness." Really, download the samples on the website. The technology is really good. -- although the site seems to be slashdoted at the moment. I grabbed some samples from the site after I heard the story on NPR, and they are quite amazing. I can't find the link at the moment, but I know I read somehting (from a U.S. distributer) about how the ELP laser turntable ain't as good as the company says it is - as far as build quality or sound reproduction -- and the records need to be ridiculously clean. This story uses a completely different technology anyway. When I heard this story I was delighted and impressed with the results. There are a lot of "one of a kind" recordings out there that will benefit our collective culture. Maybe this will become a[n] (affordable) consumer product in the future. The ELP is uber expensive and quite old besides.
I record bacon frying on a hot skillet. Then I reverse the polarity of the sound by hooking up my speakers backwards. I superimpose this over the phonograph and it all balances out.
Oh yeah, I almost left out the part about firing up a large doobie.
I don't know what slashdot is coming to, this is a total dupe! OK, so that story is from 2005, so what? OK, so I remember slashdot stories from two years ago. So what? Doesn't mean I don't have a life. Right? Right?
(Actually that other story is pretty cool, has some neat pictures and goes more in depth on the technology. And theres a nice thread talking about three-grooved records).
--
Looking for a C/C++ job in Silicon Valley?
Qxe4
http://www.npr.org/about/growth.html
"The audience for NPR programming has doubled in the last ten years to 26 million weekly listeners."
They still play classical around here tho.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQUID
http://www.xkcd.com/354/
how dumb are you, seriously? don't tell me you are slashdot-terminal
D'oh
While I have no doubts that this is innovative product - personally I am satisfied with have a googlephonic stereo with a moon-rock needle. it's OK for a car stereo, but I wouldn't want it in my house.
apologies to Mr. Steve Martin.
I'm not a Troll, it's reverse psychology.
So, if you use this system and want to digitize 10 albums, consisting of a total of five hours of music, it will take you almost five hours. Now imagine...
I'm on the lookout for a system that will make new recordings audible again.
Virtually every new recording is compressed to the Nth degree with no sense of dynamics and utterly bereft of feeling and life. MP3 compression only makes bad recordings worse.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
http://www.elpj.com/about/index.html
J
They are trying to find a way around the net radio tax situation. Tax evaders....UNITE!
I'd like to see a double-sided scanner.
- slide in your LP, both sides get scanned simultaneously -- maybe two passes and a slightly different angle to get the benefit of 3-D
- the software converts the grooves into mp3 / m4a, figures out where the tracks are
- pings CDDB with the name of the album and artist to get the track names (while CDDB and vinyl is flaky due to the track length varying between the vinyl and CD versions, I'm sure you could constrain the search)
- slide in the album cover, both images get scanned (and maybe use OCR to get the text, and perhaps even the track names...)
Ta da, your records are in iTunes, tracks and album art. And the RIAA is livid. Everyone wins!
Feh, this system doesn't compare with my Panasonic H401 and Pickering XV15-E750 (30 bucks on eBay...)
Seriously though, this is a great piece of technology that should find its way into commercial versions. I remember reading a Boston Globe article about the care NPR needed to take when reproducing a 1906 rare recording by the BSO. With this system, they wouldn't have to worry, plus they'd get better sound. Also the cool thing is the system will reproduce any format (center-starting records, Edison wax cylinders etc.)
Contrary to general belief, some acoustic and early electric recordings sound very decent even on acoustic reproductors (e.g. Victrola.) You can check the videos of Victolas playing on Youtube. There's a lot of rare stuff out there worth preserving.
Yeah, we've had one since 1992 as well, but it took the designers 15 years to come up with the name "IRENE" before we could start using it.
When I was a little kid I never could hear my mother. I can't hear her now either, but for a different reason.
This product when combined with the included listening devices does exactly that.
/sarcasm
Apparently it's more effective than the other system I heard about that does that.
Ewige Blumenkraft.
And they don't just pick up an off-the-shelf laser turntable because...?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
*I* myself don't get it, but maybe that's because this seems unsophisticated to me since you should be able to do this with commonplace tools already available to the process and design market.
For example, in the higher end engineering and process control world, they do laser scanning of surfaces to reverse engineer, for quality control, etc., and they can get down to micron levels regularly. There are a number of hobbiest projects where they laser scan surfaces and based on the reflection, can reconstruct a surface upon multiple reads. You can get very good resolution this way. There are various other techniques as well that can achieve similar results.
Likewise, I'm not sure why they just don't stuff these in the various medical tomography machines out there, whether optical, MRI, or CT, depending on material type. A tech could give you better info than I, but it seems for 30 minutes, you could do a stack of them (like when an MRI or CT machine scans your head down to the top of your lungs) quickly and inexpensively by coordinating with health groups that always have a gap or two in their schedules and can fit you in (you get cheaper rates typically). Get the data, and generate the records in full 3d, find a plane, and process the 3d data, and have a full representation economically. If the disks are 1cm or less in thickness, this would work out to around $30 a disk ($1200/16 inches per scan = $1,200/16*2.54cm = $30). This would be similar to those fellows that scanned the Mac Cube or whatever when it came out to get the details of its innards without opening it up first.
...ya better get 'em out and get 'em cranked up, 'cause they're really gonna help ya on this one!
... if all the pop is removed?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
the perfect Hi-Fi quality you are expected to get out of a century old phonograph?
Surprise, surprise, listen to the fine samples. The first collection sounds like it was recorded yesterday. The technique is unbelievably excellent. This is very good news for music preservation.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The digital reproduction just isn't as warm as the analog original we're no longer able to hear in comparison. By the way, have I told you how wonderful my gold-plated connectors are? You can practically hear the money I spent!
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Thousands of them, in ur grooves, scurrying around making measurements, then going home to compare notes.
Cool idea. I hadn't heard about the guy using a scanner to do something like this, so this was a new one to me. If they're successful in the effort to reduce the hiss, this could indeed mean a lot in terms of preserving recordings (as a previous commenter mentioned, and TFA implied).
Since a lot of people (who obviously didn't RTFA) are confusing this idea with laser turntables, I'm assuming a number of you have experience with them. I am, of course, familiar with the concept, but I've never had the opportunity to play with one. Does anyone have a recording from such a unit, or know where one is posted? I'd be interested to hear a comparison on that type of machine.
It's funny you should suggest the mp3 player which historically has had the worst SNR.
Here is a link to a Japanese optical turntable called ELP. I too heard about an optical turntable a few years back...don't know if this is the same one. Sounds like a pretty neat idea though.
I'm sure I saw this being demonstrated on the now-defunct UK science show Tomorrow's World back in the early 90's.
Technically the best SNR and the most accurate response of all audio players out there.
Coincidentally, I just spent the last weekend converting some old 78s using a modern (albeit not laser-based) record player. I wrote a little article about it here: http://www.ambor.com/public/78rpm/78rpm.html, including some sample audio clips that show what the raw recording sounds like and then shows what some open source audio restoration software can do.
I saw this done years ago at an art exhibit in Seattle at 911 Media Arts. I thought it was cool (in that industrial sense) but I didn't expect to be reading about it as news something like 15 years later.
Quack, quack.
While it's damn near impossible to get a hold of new music recorded in a high resolution, digital format, it's pretty safe to say that most music is widely available at a 44.1khz sample, 16 bit sound, with no compression. Music, in this fashion, can be digitally ripped from its source, with error correction, and then compressed to a lossless format, such as FLAC or WMA Lossless.
I don't settle for anything else when I don't have to, but when I do, it's 320k mp3.
Unless, of course, you're bitching about the professionals that record and mix the tracks? I find it hard to believe that they would use lossy compression techniques.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
While it's damn near impossible to get a hold of new music recorded in a high resolution, digital format, it's pretty safe to say that most music is widely available at a 44.1khz sample, 16 bit sound, with no compression.
Wrong sort of compression. All audio CDs are compressed heavily so that this week's Best Thing Ever sounds just that little bit louder than last week's Best Thing Ever.
Wrong sort of compression. All audio CDs are compressed heavily so that this week's Best Thing Ever sounds just that little bit louder than last week's Best Thing Ever.
That's one way to explain the declining trend in the quality of music over the last several years.
I'm used to music sounding pretty good, but I go out of my way to do so. Care to elaborate?
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
Digital Needle -- http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~springer/
I think it's partially a generational thing. Here in the UK, our national general music station, BBC Radio 2, long had a reputation of playing sixties music by day and jazz and big band music by night. Its target audience was generally the over 40s. These days it has pulled its audience back to the over 30s and has actually paid attention to what the over 30s listen to, and has become the best station in the country. But then again, I'm well over 30.
Who will own the copyright?
As far as I could see, the RIAA wanted to be able to re-copyright re-recordings... so were does this go?
B.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
I don't see any reason you can't use the same technique for laser-scanning a broken record, you just have to glue it (or otherwise attach it) to another disk for support.
The cilinders are an entirely different issue though.
Try listening to some bands that actually know what dynamics are and incorporate them into their music. The recordings I have of those bands tend not to be compressed (note: dynamic compression, not data compression) because the band wouldn't let the label release it like that. The other interesting thing is that these bands tend not to be on major labels, so you're not supporting the RIAA by buying their music.
This guy's the limit!
I seem to recall the Library of Congress has an exemption from the anti-circumvention clause(s) of the DMCA.
The British Library was after similar exemptions from copyright law, no idea if they got them.
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
Even older and of great cultural importance are wax cylinder recordings.
The old wax cylinder players were also recorders, and they were portable, even if quite bulky. At the turn of the century, explorers from the Royal Geographic Society, for example, were logging these devices around the world, recording songs and rituals of many different peoples, from the folk songs of eastern Europe to war and mating rituals of tribes in the south Pacific.
These audio documents catalog communities as they were before western industry, politics, etc, seeped in during the course of the twentieth century. Many of the communities recorded in the wax cylinders have probably lost elements of their heritage, if not outright scattered. Think Hawaii, as an example which I don't mean to trivialize, but I'd rather keep it short and simple: old tribal rituals have now become entertainment pandering to the tourists at luaus or at the airport. How about modern hawaiians (or anybody else, for that matter) hearing their ancestors really going at it, psyching themselves up for the hunt at sea, when it was a do-or-die affair?
Put in another way, I forget who said it (may have been William Burroughs) and I paraphrase: "Once the natives start wearing the t-shirts, that's it, the old magic's gone". And then, there was television... Well, in the wax cylinders, there it is, that old magic.
One final example: in WFMU, the great radio station from New Jersey, there was a show years ago called The Secret Museum Of The Air, and in a program dedicated to gypsy music, they dug out a recording from 1902, a girl in her village singing a capella to her dead brother, asking him to please visit her in her dreams that night. Even through a century of pops, scratches and hiss, as well as the language barrier, it was an un-fucking-believable, mind blowing thing of extreme poignancy and beauty. Compound that with the very real possibility that nobody alive may sing this song anymore, and it just goes to another, eerie level.
This stuff needs to be rescued, restored and preserved.
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
Next question?
Get off my lawn! Damn kids.
Best Slashdot Co
I guess you have to be drunk to understand why it's funny...
The are taking the Library of Congress to court for copying phonographs.
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
I have friends who are DJ's and they've often used laser/light based vinyl decks. Yes this does modelling etc, but it's only really an un-interesting natural extension of it.
The technology for playing records by 'reading' them has been around for quite a few years, I believe the original example being the Finial turntable that came out in the 80s, later seen as the ELP turntable.
I've seen and heard the ELP 'tables on several occasions, mostly at the Consumer Electronics Show. They require the records to be scrupulously clean in order to avoid read errors and be playable. The sound quality is OK but nothing to write home about.
Has a suitable long term solution for archiving data been developed?
I only go to buffets for the unlimited soft serve.
So are we talking caveman ancient, or more recent, like maybe the time of the Battle of Thermopylae?
Slightly disreputable, albeit gregarious
Music isn't all at the same volume. To make a piece stand out, you can use compression (dynamic compression, not like mp3 compression) to make the louder bits a bit quieter and the quiet bits a lot louder. This is why TV adverts seem so much louder than the rest of the programme material - the quiet bits have been turned up. Radio stations use a thing called an "Optimod" to get the maximum possible modulation without the signal distorting, which is essentially an extremely aggressive compressor. If you listen to certain dance music where the bass drum makes the rest of the track "pump" - fade up a bit after each beat - then you're hearing compression at work.
Personally, I find jazz to be the audio equivalent of listening to someone scratch their fingers across a chalkboard for several hours, whatever the quality of the reproduction. A jazz fan would hear something very different, though.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
That's exactly what they do, and exactly what the OP is talking about.
It's referred to as "the loudness war", the industry-wide effort to make every single and album sound louder than everyone else, at the expense of dynamic range.
This YouTube video demonstrates the effect of overcompression very well: www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ
Learn from the mistakes of others. You won't live long enough to make them all yourself.
It's referred to as "the loudness war", the industry-wide effort to make every single and album sound louder than everyone else, at the expense of dynamic range.
Once again, the Wiki is your friend: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
The sad part about it is that the kids I've tried to explain this to, actually like their music to be a dull wall-of-noise. And sadly, by the time they're mature enough to perhaps appreciate the subtleties of properly-recorded music, their hearing will be too damaged to do so.
(If only they'd GET OFF MY LAWN!)
Learn from the mistakes of others. You won't live long enough to make them all yourself.
We're the RIAA and we'll just relieve you of that.
All money is OURS! Bwahahaha...
We won't stop until we can collect on a bee's fart in the forest. Bwahahaha...
And if you don't like it, well you can just take this here ice pick and shove into your ears. Bwahahaha...
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Wow. I see what you mean. I didn't know that this was a common practice, but it certainly explains a lot. I have noticed that older tracks tend to be more listenable at high volumes in my car, and in particular, how newer tracks tend to have treble that hurts my ears at the same volumes. Either way, I guess it goes to show what a nerd thinks of when he reads "Compression." Thanks for the info.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
The way I do my vinyl restoration is using Cool Edit Pro aka Adobe Audition. For the noise reduction pass, what you do is take a sample of the between-song space, which is normally empty, and then mathematically subtract this 'silence' from the entire sound file. Voila! The surface noise is eliminated from you recording, and you can then do any more de-clicking, etc. as you will.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
A few weeks ago, I was digitiging a record that hasn't made it to CD. For shits & giggles, I ran a noise reduction filter on its lowest setting. Parts of the record sounded like a very low bitrate MP3. What I realized is that sometimes the hiss masks flaws in the recording medium, and removing hiss can sound worse!
No, I will not work for your startup
Wait . . . I want to know: why are you feeding the trolls? I'm genuinely interested.
I'm not even going to click through to that article. Trivial stuff. I'd shine a light from an angle, spin the disk, scan the groove, write a computer algorithm that looks for the shadow boundaries.
Should be possible to complete the task in 1 to 4 weeks.
i could do it with audacity, but i think it would be useful to have on their web site - i didn't notice such a file there.
I was thinking about that, it reminded me of a guy who took a scanner outside and then he turned in place while it scanned. He got a surprisingly high-quality image out of it. If the disc is sufficiently flat, or if you have a scanner with infinite depth of field, you could rotate the record past the scanning element to scan it. The final, processed image would be much higher resolution at the inside, but the resolution would be limited only by the speed at which you turn the record and your means of storing (and later processing) the data. You might be able to accomplish this with a stock scanner by removing the scanning element from the tracking system, and making multiple passes (when the tracking system reaches the end, a file is produced, you stop rotating the disc (maybe even go back a bit) and then you make another "scan".)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
My suggestion is Dark Side of the Moon from the Old Masters...Pink Floyd for a comparison between vinyl & "CD Remaster"
Of course you need ALL the accesories {£5,000 worth of gear == $25,000,00 US these days, but there you go with those mad units)