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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."
The japanese have been doing this for a while now
http://www.laserturntable.com/
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I hope the GNAA fuck Michael-Mike Vick in his stupid asshole for fucking up poor defenseless doggies!!! Fuck you Vick!!!
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?
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.
Big deal. Wake me up when they can turn my girlfriend's farts into something a little easier on the ears, and make them smell like raspberries.
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
I wonder if they can help this guy?
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
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.
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
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
...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.
speaking of old recordings... i do not recall the details to the story, but it was a very early audio recording device. i did not rtfa but i doubt it was recovered using the same technique. . still, how cool is that, lincoln is almost like a god in america. what a president! and we have his voice!
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.
Turns out, "antiquated recording schemes" and "broken media" are actually forms of copy protection. Scanning in this manner clearly violates the DMCA. Of course they will be asking for around 2.5 times the economic output of the entire planet in damages to make sure the original artists (who are of course dead) are fairly compensated.
On a side note, I wonder if the poor souls recorded on these mediums will now finally be able to pay back their record company advances... minus packaging and distibution fees of course.
To boldly use to and too two times and get it right too! They're not gonna believe their eyes when they see it there!
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.
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!
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
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.
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)