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

Firsssssssst Posssssssst

[Harmonious Botch]

Cue the purists saying: "But it is supposed to have hiss. That's part of its character."

Re:Firsssssssst Posssssssst

[r_jensen11]

Cue the purists saying: "But it is supposed to have hiss. That's part of its character."

Is that before or after they yell at him for not storing as .wav or .flac?

Re:Firsssssssst Posssssssst

[The Ancients]

Cue the purists saying: "But it is supposed to have hiss. That's part of its character."

So you're saying they'd throw a hissy fit?

Re:Firsssssssst Posssssssst

[prestomation]

He's archiving as wavs, and simply making available the mp3s. I wouldn't want to host those wavs, do you?

Re:Firsssssssst Posssssssst

[Ziest]

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. ; -)

Re:Firsssssssst Posssssssst

[dontmakemethink]

Cue the purists saying: "But it is supposed to have hiss. That's part of its character."

Is that before or after they yell at him for not storing as .wav or .flac?

50 years from now they'll say, "It's supposed to have compression artifacts. It garbles the hiss to signify the archaic bandwidth and storage capacity."

Actually they'll just think it, and their Facebook status will automatically update.

Re:Firsssssssst Posssssssst

[mstahl]

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?

Re:Firsssssssst Posssssssst

[pz]

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.

I have mod points right now, and this post makes me wish there was a "-1 ignorant" rating.

You must be new here. Or at least not tech-savvy or young enough to never have thought about these things.

If you want to minimize wear between two friction surfaces the WORST thing to do is to make them both out of the same material. The best is to make one hard and the other soft. I don't know why this is true, but perhaps someone more versed in mechanical engineering and materials science can explain. In watches, for example (mechanical ones), the jeweled bearings you hear about are typically a sapphire or ruby (synthetic) cone in which a metal (steel or brass) pin rotates, not gem-against-gem. So diamond-against-vinyl makes sense (hard against soft). And not all phonograph needles were diamond; that was a relatively late phenomenon.

But far more important is how the medium -- the record itself in this case -- is manufactured. In some cases they were injection molded (rare), but more often they were pressed. Now think for a second, how are you going to make records, and do it inexpensively enough that you can sell them? Make them out of metal, like steel? And then what, cut each groove? Probably not (although that's exactly how the original lacquer disks were made). A moldable plastic sounds like a good idea. And that's how the majority of disks were (and still are) made: take a hot lump of vinyl, about the size and shape of a hockey puck, and press it between two hot disks of metal into which are carefully machined (ie, cut) grooves. Use enough pressure and the vinyl will replicate nearly every nuance of the mold. Although you can do this with a hard plastic, plastics are all pretty soft, and hard plastics have a regrettable tendency to break easily because they're brittle (like the old 78 RPM disks).

Now, you can argue that perhaps a less expensive material could be used instead of diamond for the needle, and was for a long time (eg, garnet), but the materials cost of industrial diamonds that weigh a few micrograms is next to nothing. The expense is in the shaping (playback needles aren't just pointed cones, at least good ones weren't) since that requires highly specialized equipment and skilled labor.

So, yes, it is brilliant to use diamond and vinyl. Did you ever see black dust or ribbon coming off of a record from the needle -- at least for one that was in proper alignment and not being dragged crosswise? I never did. And I still have my very playable record collection. The wear in records was not from removal of material, as with many wear mechanisms, but in gradual reshaping of the groove as the needle passed through. Thus the progress over time to lighter and lighter contact pressures and lighter and lighter cantilevers, with lighter and lighter moving masses -- eg, the moving magnet approach.

Other archival projects

[the eric conspiracy]

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.

Re:why digitize vinyl?

[icegreentea]

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.

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: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 rare vinyl with a scanner

[Animats]

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.

Re:78's, 16's...

[Z00L00K]

And another part too...

The 78 RPM records weren't on Vinyl - it's Shellac, which is a lot more sensitive than Vinyl.

Re:So who's going to stop this guy first?

[Opportunist]

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.