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Digitizing Rare Vinyl
eldavojohn writes "While the RIAA is busy changing its image to a snake eating its own tail, one man is busy digitizing out-of-print 78s. 'There's a whole world of music that you don't hear anymore, and it's on 78 RPM records,' he stated to Wired. Right now, you can find about 4,000 MP3s on his site, with no digital noise reduction implemented yet."
Slashdot (good ol' Slashdot effect), or the RIAA?
:-)
I hope this guy plans on making a torrent with his stuff
...in bed
I was going to make a hissstorical pun but that's pointless.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
In my many years in Radio, I've digitized a considerable amount of music from LP's and 45's. In most cases, I could get moderately scratchy cuts to sound almost new. The transformation is pretty impressive, to say the least! However, I wouldn't even THINK of compressing it to MP3 until AFTER I had run it through an audio clean-up utility, like Cool Edit or Audacity.
I wonder how badly the MP3 compression affects the music with all of that hiss and crackle taking-up so much bandwidth? Also, how much would the compression artifacts affect the ability of the clean-up utility to do its job?
I think it is a laudable thing to preserve some of this priceless music! Kudos!
Willie...
He's archiving as wavs, and simply making available the mp3s. I wouldn't want to host those wavs, do you?
The same music isn't there in CD or MP3. That's the whole point. This stuff is out of print, never been released in CD. It's the in summary for god's sake! "There's a whole world of music that you don't hear anymore, and it's on 78 RPM records".
And before something about noise reduction pops up. Noise reduction takes time. He rather put the mp3s up first. Notice the 'yet'. If you really want a song to be cleaner, clean it up yourself and then send the mp3 back to him.
DOH, I was wrong.
Please mod parent(me) down.
He has WAV versions of the songs, and created the 128kbps mp3s for the website.
He could use FLAC to reduce the amount of storage that takes up, though.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
Make him? Err... You should *thank* him. Really, WTF?
Maybe, you know, ask NICELY or something. But "make him?"
Anyhow, I was looking and hoping I'd find some Leadbelly. There are a few rare cuts that I don't have yet. In the meantime I'll enjoy what he's got going on though.
Make him? (I still can't get over that people would actually think that way.)
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
No, but I sure would be grateful if he'd post them in a format not controlled by a patent troll.
Ogg Vorbis would be fine, and he'd have the benefit of smaller files for the same quality.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
You could always store the raw audio in FLAC, and then use digital filtering when you convert to MP3.
1&1 - Cheap domain and web hosting.
That was pretty brilliant of the record companies, though, don't you think? Make the medium out of nice, soft vinyl, and make the worthless, replaceable needle out of the hardest mineral on the Mohs scale.
Brilliant, that is, if you want to maximize the rate at which the media wear out.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Why doesn't he contact archive.org. Archiving old material is their mission. I know they have the storage space and the bandwidth to handle it. Besides, I want to be able to torrent all the wav files. ; -)
Another day closer to redwood heaven
Not just MP3s, but 128 kbps MP3s. I know the guy means well, but there are plenty of other audiophiles doing the same thing, but they're ripping at 320 or using FLAC and putting the results on bit torrent.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
And the inability to play them on 99% of personal music or other players for that matter.
Jesus, people can be ridiculously over the top in their support of 'open' formats.
You don't have to pay anything for listening to the MP3s, he doesn't have to pay anything for making them.
They are playable on the widest number of players possible, stop whinging.
And you don't have to post only one format. If there were a choice of FLAC, mp3, and ogg on the site for different prices based on file size there isn't a problem.
4000 tracks is not really that much space anyway.
My entire collection of 12k FLAC files is only 300G of space.
Great, now you have the worst of both worlds.
He's not charging anything, this is a guy with an old turntable, a Dell, the software that came with his SoundBlaster and a copy of MultiMediaJukebox to convert to MP3 and Roxio to burn to DVD.
It's just a guy working with what he has, and I seriously doubt he has the room or the time to create 4 different formats for every one of the 4000 tracks he has.
It's not the space that will kill you. It's the bandwidth bill after someone decides to leech the entire collection.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Stop quoting nonsense you heard from your grandpa.
Film is a terrible archival medium, except for maybe silver based black and white film. It fades, the color changes, is easily damaged, and the original degrades when copied. George Lucas has spent $millions carefully restoring the archived Star Wars films, and they're a lot less than 50-60 years old. Film over 50 years old usually takes heavy processing to be even watchable.
On the other hand, digital archives are trivial to copy losslessly, so there's no need for any physical media to last for the length of the archival time.
Why doesn't everybody quit bitching about it and help the guy out? If you couldn't tell by the website linked (and by the runaway HTTP errors), this is obviously not this guy's job and it's just something he's doing to do it. He's sharing all this great stuff with us, why don't some of us offer to assist with bandwidth/technical stuff?
Now that we've established that, when will you be converting all seven thousand-plus files from his site, building a front end, populating it, and giving us access to your obviously far superior solution?
It's early in the week. You'll have it ready by Monday or so, right?
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
It should be noted that what this guy is trying to do is bring a lot of the more obscure music into the modern age. While a 128kbps mp3 doesn't provide the best sound quality, at least it's listenable.
If you're that worried about sound quality, run down to your local used record shop and pick up the 78s yourself.
The Internet is generally stupid
They aren't really purists. They are audio snobs. There's a difference.
The Internet is generally stupid
He apparently wants to make his collection available to others to _listen_ to.
MP3 is the best choice for that purpose.
The other options: vinyl, flac, wav, ogg are not.
I've heard this argument before, so I was really excited to mind a copy of my all-time favorite record sitting on the coffee table in the basement listening room of one of the fanciest audiophile stores in D.C.. I know this record; it was recorded with a single microphone and the musicians moved further or closer to it to adjust their relative volume. With lots of excitement, I started playing it... and lots of static. so much static, that I couldn't ignore it -- with the cd you hear all the creaks of the musicians chairs. So, I still assume a new record would have sounded better, but that's the thing... I like to listen to music many times and a format that eats itself puts a big barrier between me and the music.
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