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."

Comments

Be careful and use piezo cells, not magnetic ones

[franois-do]

I would like to warn all people wanting to digitize 78rpm records : the sound you get using a magnetic cell, especially stereo or mono ones posterior to the invention of "universal engraving" (around 1965 ?), you will get a hissing and unpleasant sound, and poor restitution.

Surprisingly, if you use a piezo, heavy cell (not suitable to read stereo records), you will get a much better sound, and almost no hiss. I got very good results at a time from a Dual 1010 turnable, unfortunately out of order now :-( I also have some Jack Hylton songs that do not seem to be present on his Internet tribute site (Bogey wail, Sarita...), for whoever is interested. I guess they are legally in the public domain now, as all of them date from before WW2.

Re:why digitize vinyl?

[bcrowell]

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!

Well, that isn't exactly what the summary says. The summary says the 78s are out of print, which is no surprise because 78s aren't produced anymore. There's definitely a ton of music on there that is available commercialy in modern formats. For instance, he has "Caravan," by Duke Ellington. That's an extremely famous jazz tune, and I can't imagine there's ever a time when you couldn't buy a commercial recording of it. You can buy it right now on Amazon in mp3 format for 99 cents, or on a CD reissue. I don't know if it's exactly the same performance or not.

The Wired article also has a discussion of the copyright status of these songs, which basically amounts to, "nobody's sued him so far." I guarantee you that the composition of Caravan, for instance, is still in copyright -- Tizol and Ellington wrote it in 1936, so the only way it would have passed into the public domain would have been if the copyright owner had failed to renew it -- but it was a valuable commercial property (still is), and I'm sure they did renew it. (Nothing from after 1922 has expired in the US except by failure to do the renewal that used to be required.) I don't know about the copyright on the sound recording (is the duration different?), but I'd guess it's still also in copyright.

If copyright law in the US was sane, a composition from 1936 would be in the public domain, but that doesn't change the fact that the law is not sane, it is what it is, and these recordings are not all out of print or out of copyright.

i just posted this link 3 days ago

[circletimessquare]

in the thread on the tragedy of the anticommons, but it seems even more relevant to this topic

on the subject of intellectual property and the rare souls reviving old media through blood sweat and tears, the filmmaker vincent gallo said this four years ago:

Capone: The songs selections here are inspired at times. I really liked the Gordon Lightfoot song "Beautiful."

V.G.: Thank you. The amount of time I spent choosing the music of the film would be unbelievable to you. The funny thing is, when it's not right, you spend all your time playing songs for people saying, "What do you think of this one? How about this one? How about this one?" You're dying, when you're on that level. When you hit it, it's so obvious and you immediately get a desperate feeling that says, "How am I going to get the rights? Are they going to fuck me on the rights to this song?" And guess who are the worst people in the movie business. The licensing people. They are most miserable, mean, selfish, insensitive, regressive, unproductive on the planet earth. You don't know what it's like to feel so strong about something and not have a budget to make that go away. It's not like I was looking to get some Paul McCartney song for my movie; I'm talking about esoteric music. Some of the music in the film didn't even exist, I had to rebuild the original master tapes that had decomposed. I had to re-bake the tape stock, the emulsion on the tape had peeling off. I'm the only person in the world who would salvage this particular recording because I had an original three-track machine and I knew how to bake that type of Ampex tape. The tape would have disappeared in two more years, and it's highly spliced. Then to be ballbusted for a year and a half on the licensing on that music. We talk about how long it took for me to get the film out after Cannes was because the film wasn't ready due to negative problems. I wanted to use this technique to blow up the negative in a new way. That's why I waited so long to finish the film. But it turns out that I would have had to wait seven, eight months anyway was the releases for the music. If you were dealing with the musician directly, you wouldn't have these problems. It's the people representing these artists that kill the process. I realize if you want to use the Beatles song "Revolution" to sell eyeglasses, I understand the exploitation of that. I understand that I'm using culturally significant relics to manipulate people into attaching those to my product. But if I'm using a rare piece of music by and unknown artist, not to brag, but the people whose music I use in my films sell way more records than they were selling before they were in my film. Proof of it is, the Italian artist who did this one jazz piece in my movie had sold 600 copies worldwide before my movie. Before my film was released just on the announcement that they were included people tracked down the music, and they sold something like 6,000 more copies. Why you're treated like you're exploiting this music makes no sense. If they're going to make a tough deal for you, just be up front about it. But this sort of, "We don't have time for you. What do you want?" stringing along is nonsense. And I'm the producer on THE BROWN BUNNY. I didn't have a music supervisor. I did the licensing for BUFFALO 66 and THE BROWN BUNNY. And of all my memories of making the film, that's my most painful memories.

bottom line: revive old media, bring renewed attention AND SALES to a long forgotten artist and piece of music, and expect the corporate intellectual property assholes to punish you for effort

thats the state of intellectual property today

Re:i just posted this link 3 days ago

[jd]

Thanks for that. When the Universal studio went up in smoke this year, it did not destroy films but it DID destroy the only known copies of any of their music from the 50s and earlier. How much money do you think they'll make from the ash? "Not a whole lot" is my guess. They also lost a lot of remastered early movies, where the originals are too artsy to be worth remastering again, going by $ value alone. Again, how much do you think they'll get from the smouldering remnants?

Now, if those works had been generally available under public domain, those artists would be better known and maybe, if any works are still under honest copyright, have greater market value. But, no, they wanted their hard cash up-front and in big quantities, even if that meant risking losing everything. They don't care about what society has lost, they only care about what they can take for themselves.

It might be better if there was staggered copyright whereby rights automatically revert from whoever owns the rights to the creator of the work after 40 years, and they (and their estate) get to hold the rights for a further 10 or 20 years. It wouldn't stop the corporate abuses, but it would restrict them, and it would lessen the need any actual artist might have for a longer copyright, because they'd be earning five to ten times as much per sale towards the end of the copyright lifetime.

Removing hiss and pops

[Okian Warrior]

As a suggestion, how about digitizing the songs several times and then using the redundant data to recreate the originals with no hiss or pop.

As I understand it, pop is sometimes caused by buildup and sudden release of static electricity. This means that the pops will be in different places for different digitizations and can therefore be recognized and accounted for. Scratches, on the other hand...

Hiss is stochastic noise and would average out over several recordings.

It should be straightforward to use a correlation coefficient correction to bring all the recordings into "phase", then use a processing algorithm to remove most of the artifacts.

The artifacts that remain can be removed using techniques more suited to single-images; ie - filtering to remove hiss and pop.

Re:why digitize vinyl?

[pixel.jonah]

Sadly you're right - US copyright law is messed up.

From: http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/copyright.php
"Sound recordings were not eligible for federal copyright protection until 1972 and recordings made prior to this date are only protected by state and common-law copyright. All Edison cylinders are presumed to be in the public domain as the assets of Edison Records were transferred to the National Park Service, a federal agency. Other American sound recordings made prior 1972 may or may not be protected by state laws or common-law copyright. Foreign cylinders are all public domain in the country of production and are also presumed to be in the public domain in the United States.

The nature of the various state laws and differing interpretations of these laws in state courts means that the legal status of many early recordings is unclear. The passage of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 reiterated that all recordings made prior to February 15, 1972 are only eligible for protection under state laws until February 15, 2067, when federal law preempts state law and they enter the public domain. While the Sonny Bono law was intended primarily to extend the copyright protection to the soon-to-expire copyrights of multinational corporations and heirs to songwriters, in effect it meant that all early recordings, no matter what their commercial potential, historical importance, or availability as reissues (with the exception of Edison Recordings) may be protected for well over 150 years after their creation. This is in stark contrast to the original copyright law passed in 1790 which granted a 14-year term of copyright (renewable for another 14 years) or the copyright law in effect for other types of publications when these cylinders were recorded which granted a copyright or 28 years, renewable for another 14 year (28 years after 1909). Not a single person who composed a song recorded on these cylinders or sang into the recording horn is alive today, which suggests that the original intent of copyright to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" has been completely usurped by the Sonny Bono law."

This happens to be another incredible collection of old recordings: http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/

Re:Digitizing vinyl

[KGIII]

I realize you're modded off topic but...

Noise Removal - Audacity Wiki:
http://www.audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php?title=Noise_Removal

There are a pile of resources for Audacity, the wiki is one of the first places I'd look and, in this case, did.

The QUAD underground

[clokwise]

There are also an amazing number of people who are transferring old Quad albums and tapes from the 70s. They digitize them and then re-release them on Bittorrent as DTS encoded .wav files which can playback with any CD player and any standard 5.1 surround sound system. I personally possess nearly a terabyte of such albums, and I've hardly scratched the surface of what's out there. It's amazing to listen these old quad albums because most of them were professionally mixed and they enable the listener to appreciate the music more than any stereo recording can, often you get entirely different takes than the stereo release. Check out http://groups.google.com/group/SurroundSound/ or Demonoid torrent site.

Re:Firsssssssst Posssssssst

[PFI_Optix]

Shhh we want to complain about how he doesn't do everything we want while giving us free music.

His copy of Mack the Knife is BEAUTIFUL. Sounds better than my 78 version. I want his copy :(

Re:Firsssssssst Posssssssst

[Xizer]

Transcoding from a lossy format to another lossy format sounds GREAT on the ears!