Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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
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.
What pisses me off to no end about that is that they'd rather let a rare piece of art vanish into oblivion rather than have it digitized and spread to preserve its existance. If we can't make money out of it, it's not worth existing.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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?
They aren't really purists. They are audio snobs. There's a difference.
The Internet is generally stupid