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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."
Cue the purists saying: "But it is supposed to have hiss. That's part of its character."
Slashdot (good ol' Slashdot effect), or the RIAA?
:-)
I hope this guy plans on making a torrent with his stuff
...in bed
Here is how NOT to digitize 33's
That's really about all I can say. Oh, and his studio looks way cool!!
The Library of Congress has an archival project:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1216161
This is going the other way - from digital to 78's. Shellac 78's appear to be the best archival format.
I was going to make a hissstorical pun but that's pointless.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Victor Borge is one of those performers that just seems timeless, always good.
I've been debating whether to use digital filtering for noise/scratches when I record my vinyl collection. It's kind of nice to hear it again. I've bookmarked that page! Awesome!
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Someone should download the entire site and post it on bit torrent... then email this guy so he can put the bit torrent link on his site.
I feel bad for his poor server.. its about to get quite a few hits since this is now on slashdot.
...and all of Dad's 78's are still safely tucked away...
For all you whippersnappers who don't remember records: not only were there 78 RPM records, and of course the 33 1/3 and 45's you are aware of, but they also used to make 16's (technically 16 2/3 RPM). I used to own one record in that format (long since lost to the grue in the attic). It was just speech, not music; I think they didn't typically use that speed for music because of fidelity limitations of 16 RPM.
I made the mistake of getting rid of my (admittedly modest) vinyl collection in the 80's when CD's were the up and coming thing. Sorta wish I hadn't, now. I'm not one of the people who think vinyl has superior sound, but it did have a certain charm.
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...
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.
Then the purists should invent a way to digitally record all of the information. All the 3D characteristics of the record.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
A Russian has been up to this since the mid-90s, digitizing old Soviet LPs (1930s on up) and putting them on his site (http://www.sovmusic.ru/english/) for free.
It's a very extensive collection, and is worth a look, regardless of what you think about Russia's past or current behavior.
:D
I prefer a void in conversation to a vacuous one.
What an unlikely place to find cover of a video game theme...
Most 78's (there are exceptions, including the very famous and historically important V-discs) are not vinyl.
They are shellac, or rather a mixture of shellac, wax, slate, and a cotton or paper filler.
I personally believe that the decline of the music industry is directly related to the replacement of shellac with vinyl, and that the RIAA must remedy this decline immediately.
78s were not made of vinyl. The substance was much closer to wax, FYI.
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
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
DownThemAll A list of links - how very convenient.
-- Put crudely, the world is an extremely large problem instance. (Russel/Norvig Artificial Intelligence)
check out the Cylinder Preservation Project: http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/
i got a bunch of stuff from there quite a while back. it's not exactly hi fi...but it's extremely interesting (if you're into the history of music sort of thing). probably even more than these 78s, though, you have to be aware that turn of the 20th century popular entertainment was often quite racist and bigoted. it's not all like that, but it's a definite presence in the collection.
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.
Signature omitted in order to save space. Thanks for your understanding.
So, uh, he did it right then :)
Yeah, I know, I RTFA, so sue me.
...
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.
Find free books.
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:
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
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
He's doin' Yosemite Sam!!
This guy certainly isn't alone. My father has taken it upon himself to archive, catalog, and digitally store thousands of long out of print Folk Music LPs from Eastern Europe. These records are outside of the scope of the Library of Congress (as they were mostly recorded/printed outside of the US), and are some of the few ways to have (mostly) accurate records of a rapidly vanishing folk music tradition.
Not a bad way to spend your retirement, hmm?
1) Abandonware is not a legally sound concept, and that defense won't hold up in court. (Though it may lessen damages since it'd be harder to establish actual ones. That said, the main killer in copyright law is statutory damages, and this wouldn't less that.)
I'm not a lawyer either, but at least I've read a good portion of the 1976 copyright act, and there's nothing in it for abandoned work.
2) Your parent's point is largely that some stuff -- like the Caravan song he mentions -- are not abandonware.
I spent 20 years convincing people to save the acetate (pre-vinyl) records before I gave up, and now there is finally a cheap enough technology to be used by the common person to save them in the full spectrum (better than vinyl?)...
SAVE THEM!! PLEASE SAVE THEM!
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.
It is not the cartridge itself that matters. The shape of the needle changed from the 78 size to a smaller one for the microgroove recordings. (33 + 1/3 and 45 ) The smaller radius on the end of the later needles means that it will be riding on the bottom of the groove instead of on the two sides ( at 45 degrees). Back in the day (fifties and sixties)the cartridge often had both types and could be turned over to select the correct one.
Of course for best fidelity the single use steel needle is preferred....:) I still have a wind up gramophone of maybe twenties or thirties vintage that uses these. No amplification, no electricity.
I never thought of him singing Arabic Folk Songs.
Great site.
photosMy Photostream
the all important archive.org. There is a section for audio files of old audio cylinders and 78 records. If you have any that are now in the public domain, please digitize and upload for the rest of us :-)
I feel like death on a soda cracker.
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/
some of the song lyrics are racist and at least one of them is x-rated and people have to request it.
The early 20th century had a lot of raw, dry, dark, and offensive humor in their songs. People who didn't grow up during those days will find it horribly offensive, esp during the WWII anti-Japanese years or during when segregation was still a law and songs mocked African-Americans.
Just a warning for people who are easily offended, some of these songs might offend them. So do us all a big favor if you are one of them and don't listen to those songs. Monty Python had a similar warning on their show for the same reasons.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Some great music there! Already found a few Blue Bird Glenn Miller recordings I've never even seen before (old timey big band jazz ftw).
Yes it is legal to download anything you want on the Internet without the RIAA suing you over it, Here's your sign! :)
If you have to ask if it is legal to download songs that were ripped from old 78s without the permission of the company that holds the copyright on the song, chances are you might need a sign that says "stupid". :)
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
You mean he doesn't have the CDDB plugin for his KLH turntable? Seriously, none of the files have any ID3 tags. He's also using an ACCESS database. I think the archive gods are displeased with this one.
I think he is more like 12, got a computer for his birthday and just figured out how to download songs for free over the Internet using the fake version of Kazza that installs Spyware and Trojans on his Windows system, running AOL 9.0 without the Antivirus option because he is not smart enough to enable it or update or activate it.
The old "If they aren't selling it recently, it is abandonware and free!" He most likely downloaded a trojan infected version of Windows XP because Vista sucked as it was too hard to figure out how to turn off that security guard from the Apple commercials.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
This is quite an impressive bit of work, and kudos to dude for posting the mp3 version of his archived .wavs. Seeing the whole page of awesome music (and the sub pages of Japanese, Arabic, and Greek stuff as well) really makes me want to see this all packaged up as a torrent - and sooner than later. Spidey sense says many of these will be drawing unwanted interest.
When I was a kid my mother had an old record collection - mostly 45s but some 78s and such as well. I remember there was one that I enjoyed, with a female vocalist whose name I forget, featuring a song "Pizza Patrick" (all kids love pizza, right? a song about an Irish boy "from County Cork" immigrating to New York who stepped inside a pizza parlor just after he got off the boat, and absolutely fell in love with the substance, eating it in great quantity and attaining local celebrity) and, on the reverse side, something like "My love has become a miner" (he something-somethings... I watch him from the top of the shaft and no one bothers meeeeee ./~~~~~~~ later the love goes on to try a variety of other professions including a fisherman and later a sailor, where she watches for him on the ocean shore, or some such).
I was recently reminded of this by SomethingorotherIforget and searched for the two songs, and was kind of left hanging. That stuff is off the edge of the Internet. You can't find anything about it anywhere online. I'll probably never hear them again. (I damaged the record from overplaying it, if I recall correctly.) CD? MP3? If you got 'em send 'em on over, but....
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
I was expecting someone putting a record into a flatbed scanner
That's been tried, and it sort of works. But ordinary scanners don't have enough resolution. The Library of Congress has a scanner that does. They image the disc at a resolution of 1 micro per pixel, which yields 8 GB or so of imagery. Then they have software which can reconstruct the audio from the image.
Not only is this useful for fragile, unique records, but it will work on cracked or scratched ones. It's even possible to reconstruct a broken record if you have all the pieces.
The current scanner only works for horizontal recording; it can't read depth. So it won't work on vertically recorded records (Edison) or stereo (45/45 Westrex has two components 90 degrees apart.) They're working on that.
Silly question, regarding digitizing 78s. If one can get the right stylus, can't one take a 33 1/3 TT and sample at a 2.34:1 ratio so the net result is like 44.1/48/96 what have you. 78s are likely pre RIAA filters and as such base response shouldn't be that much of an issue.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
If that were my project and I was putting that much work into the data creation I would want a lot more reliable hardware and backups. I'd also work to do more automation.
But, awesome work, and thanks for sharing (:
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
My father has a vintage Victrola (tall, stand up, flip-top cabinet about 1.75' square x 5 feet tall with a crank on the side) and a bunch of *very* old records (some with copyright stickers dating "1903" or "1913", I don't have them in front of me). I don't know what the records are made out of, but it seems to be a sort of very hard plastic. Possibly Bakelite, but I'm not sure. I would love to find someone who could digitize these for me, because some of the songs are quite classic.
However, the needles, unlike modern records, are, quite literally like very short finishing nails with the heads cut off. This, combined with the weight of the arm means that with each play, the record quality decreases, as you can see a visible layer of the plasitc peeling and curling up off the record surface and around the needle/nail.
Doe anybody know of a specialist who deals with professionally digitizing such old records?
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
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.
If you really want a song to be cleaner, clean it up yourself and then send the mp3 back to him.
Cleaning an MP3 is rather dubious since the final result will have been encoded, decoded, and re-encoded to a lossy format. The low frequency range of 78's makes it feasible, yet difficult to palate. Trust me, been there, done that.
If you're aiming for a noise floor of a relatively modern recording, even from the 70's, you're looking at about 18+dB reduction. Removing large amounts of hiss is best done in layers with 6-7dB reduction each, so we're talking at least three passes through a good multiband noise gate, each layer leaving artifacts of its own.
It's actually very interesting doing the processes together in realtime. At first it didn't make sense to me that they even made realtime multiband NR, but the best settings for each layer vary depending on the dynamics of the content. The first layer deals with just the louder segments, so you use different settings if they tend to be a vocalist or a drum, for example. The second and third deal with lower level sounds and don't vary quite so much, but the amounts of noise each layer will reduce is a matter of trial-and-error.
In the end, you leave just enough hiss behind to mask the artifacts. Any artifacts present in the source file have to be masked too, so they greatly affect the amount of hiss that can be removed. He definitely should be archiving to a lossless format if he ever expects anyone to work on them at a later date.
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
I hope he doesn't get sued. I just found the version of Rock Island Line that I have on a scratched 45. Yaaahhhhhhoooo!
I reserve the write to mangle english.
Oh, I'm glad I got to hear that before Yahoo put the kibosh on the site... Just watched "Be Kind, Please Rewind" and that's the first song I searched for. Fats Waller is my new music icon for the week.
Hope it comes back online soon.
There is simply too much glass..
I worked with Shure, there was a project to create finer tip diamond stili to go below the wear in grooves for the Library of Congress. It was succesful, I know some Edison cylinders were recovered this way. I had a friend that was working on a laser technique too, I don't know what ever happened to that. I did my own optical data recovery of cylinders, with stepper motor drives tracking at recording pitch and a video microscope. I used frame grabbers and some code to convert the longitudinal recorded tracks back to sampled data. I would love to re spin this idea with new hardware, and a source of cylinders.
PLEASE don't /. this site! I've only got 3736 mp3s left to download!
This guy had too much time on his hands, but I appreciate all his work greatly! Some good stuff there! De Hot Club du France!
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
Yeah? I was just going to say that I have 3 versions of Rock Island Line (all from albums, all by Leadbelly) and none of them are the same as his.
Dad had crates of them and he picked up cheap players at fetes that you could wind up.
Sadly us young boys wrecked a number of the records and I ruined one of the players with my half-arsed engineering skills. I tried to slow the player down enough to play at 45rpms. The styluses were brass? or silver and would destroy the newer vinyl anyway. We grew up playing the Andrews Sisters, Glen Miller Band and Mario Lanza.
When I was twelve, I visited a friend who played his "Fireball" Album and I left the 78s behind.
Slashdot: Where nerds gather to pool their ignorance
That spring into mind:
Record revolution stability, the speed of playback varies throught playback and each recording would be different length.
Synchronizing the start of the recording to the exact same start since this is analog and there are no sample boundries.
Stability in the clock generator for the ADC, same problem as revolution stability but not as accute.
It is not the cartridge itself that matters. The shape of the needle changed from the 78 size to a smaller one for the microgroove recordings. (33 + 1/3 and 45 )
Yes. These cells commonly used a commutable needle : one for 78 rpm and another for the microgroove, and a level allowed to switch from one to the other. Needless to say, I supposed the right needle was used.
That being said, piezo cartridges and magnetic ones accepted at a time these dual needles, so using the right needle is necessary, but here not sufficient :-)
Of course for best fidelity the single use steel needle is preferred....:)
That might be. When I was very young we used to have a "Peter Pan" portable mechanical 78rpm player and we had a box of needles, which had to be changed rather frequently. I had the surprise, when reading its user's manual to see that the manufacturer recommendend changing the needle after each record, which seems unbelievable. I always wondered if that really applied to steel needles, or just to former bamboo needles, which I never had a chance to see.
I still have a wind up gramophone of maybe twenties or thirties vintage that uses these. No amplification, no electricity.
What makes me sade evert time there is a technology change is the know-how that it lost with it forever - except perhaps a for a few passionates which allow it some survival. In french brocantes, it is common to find objects for sale, the function of which is ununderstandable, even for its preceding owners :-/
Signature omitted in order to save space. Thanks for your understanding.
All kinds of music that I would have never heard, or even knew existed. Well worth it in my opinion. Oddly enough, listening to the Arabic music makes me want to find a hookah and like 4 belly dancers.
I've been digitizing my parents records since I started high school in 1999. I don't spend every waking hour on this, but I've found a few gem. Plus, when I listen to music that is hot now, many of the same "beats/instrumentals" have been taken from these old songs. There is a lost history of these old records out there, you can find the same albums on amazon but they've been re-mastered and put together differently. this guy is awesome.. and I will continue my conversion.
this guy is making as close to 1:1 backups of these things as is possible since the music that is on them is no longer available else where on other formats. hell, if he found it on CD now, he would have a hard time finding something that would play it... jk.
really though, this guy is doing something, by himself, with his own money, that the record companies should have done (and could have made money from, shocked they didnt pick up on that) a while a go now.
portfolio
From the website:
PLEASE NOTE THAT WHAT WAS CONSIDERED HUMOR EARLY IN THE 20TH CENTURY MIGHT TODAY BE DEEMED OFFENSIVE AND POLITICALLY INCORRECT. SOME OF THESE OLD SONGS REFLECT THAT.
I have to add some random text here so slashdot won't complain I have too many caps... There! slashdot cap protection hacked!
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.
Then he uses lousy fhg mp3 encoding for the files. That's almost (though a stretch) like recreating the Sisteen Chapel with a 64pk of crayolas. I was a little let down that a guy this dedicated to preserving music didnt look more into details of proper .mp3 encoding. It's great what he's doing, but as the cliche goes, "You're doing it wrong (somewhat)." VBR would have been nice as well for reducing storage size. I'm doubting Glenn Miller's 1940 something rendition of "In the Mood" really needs over 3mb of space if done in 3.97 lame vbr.
It's the Tortoise.
But once he's converted them, can they be played on Record Player X?
"... and more and more now there are all kinds of electronic goodies available" -- Pink Floyd 1972
Is it the same version though. I just got a version of a song, from there, that I have been looking for for years. Yes, it was available by the same artist, but it wasn't the same version as the one I grew up with. He had exactly the right version!
I reserve the write to mangle english.
Because Apple hates you and wants you to suffer.
The Internet is generally stupid
how hard can it be to grasp the concept that WAV == WAV.gz == FLAC?
In the future, you might have a WAV decoder as a binary built into the operating system. You might have the source code for a $LOSSLESS decoder. But you can't compile the $LOSSLESS decoder to run on your own computer because you don't have a code signing certificate that costs hundreds of dollars a year.
The future is now with Windows Vista 64-bit (unless you want "Test Mode" in all four corners of the screen all the time) and more importantly with virtually any popular handheld audio player.
The early 20th century had a lot of raw, dry, dark, and offensive humor in their songs. People who didn't grow up during those days will find it horribly offensive, esp during the WWII anti-Japanese years or during when segregation was still a law and songs mocked African-Americans.
But has anything changed since then? Now songs mock African-Americans, except they're actually written by African-Americans. Listen to how many rap songs use "nigga" in every other line. Be it wrong or right, these are the ghetto highlights.
My wife and I like a lot of the "old stuff" and what you are doing is great. We really appreciate the work you are doing.
I'm downloading the entire list as I type, or at least trying to. It may take several retries. Yahoo seems to be having some troubles with the load its getting.
Good work, and thanks again.
His 78 equipment is very low-end, even for its day. That GE cartridge is a piece of junk.
Now this guy has a real 78 digitizing rig:
http://mdcarter.smugmug.com/gallery/2424008_RKGvb#127077056_gUrCf-A-LB
http://mdcarter.smugmug.com/gallery/2424008_RKGvb#127077282_wtgLn-A-LB
http://mdcarter.smugmug.com/gallery/2424008_RKGvb#127135149_Hz9WH-A-LB
Full disclosure: "this guy" is also my father, and is a professional audio engineer. He also designs and builds his own loudspeakers, including all the loudspeakers you see in this space (they're transmission line technology).
FYI, in the US, it is only material published before 1923 that is guaranteed to be public domain.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
I clicked through to the pics of his "studio" and I didn't see a record-cleaning machine. I heartily applaud this guy for his efforts. I really do. But it's not possible that anyone would go to this much work without doing the one thing that most effectively reduces noise and static, is it?
I'm a tad suspicious of that one. He seemed like he was squeezing it _really_ hard. Like he was intentionally trying to break it.
If you're holding something as delicate as say an egg shell, when you break it, it doesn't fly so far and fast, unless you're really putting a lot of force on it.
Maybe it was very heavy and delicate. Even so, looking at the video, if it was really unintentional maybe they should have got someone else to demo it, or done it differently.
Don't forget http://www.jazz-on-line.com/. This site has 21,000 tunes available.
He has the source in .wav format. The .mp3's are for public consumption. Does everyone just comment without reading first?
Why choose white shoes?
yahoo pulled the site - or someone pulled it. It's gone
I was able to get 20 something tunes earlier. I was humanly selective - probably stupid on my part - and now I wish I could get more. No RIAA, I don't want you getting rich off graves, I wont pay you for this.
Yahoo: 1 /.: nil
or is that...?
I don't therefore I'm not.
I'm getting nothing but errors when I try to pull any of these up. They were working earlier, but it looks like Yahoo has pulled them.
Am I the only one getting a "508 Unused" error when I visit http://78records.cdbpdx.com/ ? I wonder if his site was taken down by the publicity (not ready for that level of traffic) or by legal threats?
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Nice setup. I love my Paradigm Studio 20's & 40's.
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.
There's a FUSE filesystem that is intended for this purpose, yacufs. It would be swell if a Slashdotter could hook this guy up with a server and set it up for him.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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.
Have you ever seen how records are made at a record factory? Vinyl was used because it was a known plastic at the time and easily mass produced. Switching to 33RPM vinyl brought down the price of records so that everybody could afford them, AIUT.
I think you're asking for the $200,000 car that requires almost no maintenance.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
FYI, in the US, it is only material published before 1923 that is guaranteed to be public domain.
Thanks for the PSA. I'll just remind folks that it's Disney who gave us this situation, and every dollar spent on Disney makes it more likely that no new(ha!) material will ever enter the public domain.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I listen to Tom Morgan's "Jazz Roots" program 9AM/Central every Wednesday, streaming live from WWOZ.org, the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage radio station (connected to the massive Jazzfest, but independent - and commercial free). Morgan's got one of the biggest and deepest collections in the world of 78 RPM records, and plays them in very interesting playlists, narrated briefly and enthusiastically to illustrate what they were when they were released in the first part of the 20th Century.
If you're interested in the era recorded on 78s, tune to Morgan's WWOZ.org stream for probably the best presentation of them available.
--
make install -not war
Hopefully he keeps the original audio in a format like FLAC or uncompressed PCM. MP3 is not an archival format. If he goes back to the mp3 and applies noise reduction or does anything at all to them then there will be serial compression generation loss - ugly. Even the deadheads are more scrupulous about preserving their audio.
Given that he doesn't care too much about the quality of the turntable he's using, I wouldn't me surprised if all he has is mp3.
Um, 78s aren't vinyl. They're shellac.
My guess is that they want you to use their proprietary format (yes, I know they don't have control, and it's a standard, but it's patent-encumbered and there aren't a lot of decent free software tools for manipulating it) so that it's a pain in the ass to switch away from iTunes and iPod.
You don't have to suffer with a broken Dual turntable. I sent my Dual 1229 off for repair by a person that has a passion for these old Duals: http://www.fixmydual.com/
you will get a hissing and unpleasant sound, and poor restitution.
I'm confused. Does this mean that the fines from the RIAA will be more, or less than normal?
"If your parents never had children, chances are you wonât either." -Dick Cavett
Looks like Yahoo pulled or limited the site. All I get is "Error 503: Unused", a very strange error. This is from my original IP, a changed IP, and through a couple of Tor exit nodes.
Very sad.
Interesting -- thanks for the info on copyright law! The law on sound recordings really sounds like a horrible muddle.
It looks like the site is dead now. I'm getting a 508 error. Here is the google cache of his main page. Most likely he went over his webhost's quota due to the slashdot effect, or maybe his webhost already got a DMCA takedown notice, since most of the music on his page was actually still in copyright and still commercially available. As an experiment, I picked the following random sample of seven tunes from his page (scrolling down the list, and taking one line per screenful):
The Muggsy Spanier tune dates to the 50's, is still in copyright, and is available on a 2006 CD reissue. "A Thousand Kisses" was recorded around 1924, so it's probably still copyrighted, but it doesn't seem to be commercially available now. "After You've Gone" was recorded in 1947, it's still copyrighted, and it's still commercially available. "All the Cats Join In" was recorded in 1936, is still copyrighted, and is still commercially available. "And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine," still in copyright, still available. "Artistry in Rhythm", ditto. "Away Out on the Mountain", ditto.
The claim in the slashdot summary that the music is out of print is wildly misleading, since 6 out of 7 songs from my sample are commercially available. The Wired article's statement that "The copyright situation surrounding some of these songs is as murky as their sound quality" is likewise pretty silly -- it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that recordings from the 1950's by famous jazz artists are still in copyright.
Find free books.
This is a UK company that does spectacular vinyl => digital transcriptions of out-of-copyright 78's and 33's. As I write this I'm listening to a beautiful recording from April, 1954, of Toscanini conducting the NBC Symphony Orchestra in Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6.
It's not "free as in beer," but I have no problem with that when I think of the amount of effort they have put into making this music available. Prices vary depending on the length of the recording and the format you want it in. They offer the MP3 of this 4-disc set (74:52 play time) for 7 euros, 16 bit FLAC for 9 euros, and 24 bit FLAC for 15 euros.
We found these guys when we were trying to cleanly record a 1950's performance of a Requiem Mass by a monk's choir. We have the vinyl and it's in pretty good shape, but our recording of it still had a fair amount of pop and some hiss. On a lark I googled on the album name and, son-of-a-bitch!, there it was. I listened to about a minute of their file (they give loooong samples) and it was .... spectacular. I didn't think twice in paying them 9 euros for it.
Last month I gave a friend (who teaches jazz and plays marimba in small clubs) the 1953 Massey Hall concert recording "The Quintet -- The Trio." 76 minutes of the Masters playing together. Charlie Parker (alto saxophone), Dizzy Gillespie (trumpet), Bud Powell (piano), Charles Mingus (double bass), Max Roach (drums). He had heard bits of it before, but was blown away by having a quality recording of the entire concert.
The success of this company shows (yet again) just how stupid the RIAA really is. They have so much music locked away and they make only a small part of it available. If they spent a fraction of their enforcement budget on re-releasing classics they might find out the true meaning of Long Tail.
since about 15:30 GMT the website reports: Yahoo! Yahoo! - Help Sorry, unused. The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request. Please contact the server administrator, admin@yahoo-inc.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
This descibe the current state of the art in pulling sound off old records. Basically they use a microsope and camera to scan the groves. The sound is recovered from the scans. The result is better quality than when the record was new and played on then current players. See the URL below for more info.
http://sciencematters.berkeley.edu/archives/volume4/issue30/story1.php
These old wax recording were made with purely mechanical equipment. It's posable to recover very high quality sound, better then the people who made the records would have imagined. All that hiss and clicks came from defects in the media the optical scanner does not pick this up.
In my younger days, I played Wasteland, the de facto predecessor to Fallout and Fallout 2! And before that was Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar, the game that basically shaped my moral code. dunno if that makes me old school or just old.
-- haaz.
No disrespect, but considering the fact that:
-You quoted a Coolio song
-Coolio has never been considered "hot in the streets"
-Coolio hasn't even really appeared on Billboard charts since the 90's
-Coolio has never been (and probably never will be) considered a top talent in Hip-Hop
I'm thinking you might not be the foremost authority on Hip-Hop as a cultural phenomenon.
However, I can't say that I disagree with your assertion about black folks mocking themselves in the context of Rap music. In fact, these guys seem to feel the same way, and it's the theme of one of their albums:
http://bad.eserver.org/reviews/2007/littlebrother.htm
One of my favorite albums of all time.
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Ceramic and other piezo cartridges actually effectively had the RIAA equalisation curve built in to the cartridge itself
Maybe... but the ones I played with were the dual headed variety that could be rotated to play 78s.
These cartridges didn't have any EQ circuitry built in as the preamp did all the work.
But you are right, EQ controls can bring the tonal balance to the right levels.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
Forgot to say that the pre 1920s 78s had a spiral groove that could accommodate low frequencies as the gap between each groove was quite large. Consequently, some records could only hold a few minutes of audio. This was before any applied EQ.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
As people say : "I can give the time, but unfortunately that does not mean I know how to repair watches" ;-)
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You don't have to suffer with a broken Dual turntable. I sent my Dual 1229 off for repair by a person that has a passion for these old Duals: http://www.fixmydual.com/
Thanks a lot ! It is nice that the know-how on old technologies continues to live through passionate amateurs. Hmmm... perhaps I could event try to have my old Revox A77 fixed or converted to 4-tracks :-)
Though the following is rather off-topic, there are here a lot of CitroÃn Traction avant fans, who keep their models running and in shape. Whenever a part breaks, they examine it and recreate a copy of it with small machine-tools they share. Much better than the original ones, in fact.
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"At the death of one of these two authors", Hugo said, "it is only fair the other one, the people should inherit all the rights". This was a coureageous move, as Hugo's family lived essentially on his author's rights.
To be really fair, we should perhaps allow 20 years of copyright after the author's death so his family has a lot of time to find jobs. I do not see however any legitimate reason why it should be more. Struggle and dog fights do not have anything to do with reason, as fas as I know :-(
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All of his Hank Williams recordings are the exact same versions I bought on CD. It's not as if you have to buy the 10-disc box set, either; those songs can be found on any Greatest Hits CD that you can buy just about anywhere.
Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers.
..by /.'ing this story, he's had to take the domain down. People were downloading the entire archive, (according to him is 10gigs+)....and his host shut him down.
There are 2 groups of people you can make fun of on the Internet without fear of attack. The illiterate, and the Amish.