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Scientists Play World's Oldest Commercial Recording
sciencehabit writes "The scratchy, 12-second audio clip of a woman reciting the first verse of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star doesn't sound like much. But the faint, 123-year-old recording—etched into a warped metal cylinder and brought back to life after decades of silence by a three-dimensional (3D) optical scanning technique—appears to belong to the first record intended for sale to the public. Made for a talking doll briefly sold by phonograph inventor Thomas Edison, the early record is the oldest known American recording of a woman's voice and may be the oldest known record produced at Edison's laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey."
This unauthorized duplication and public performance of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star is in clear violation of the "Copyright Lasts For Fucking Ever Act of 2009" and we insist you pay residuals to the Sony/BMG Music Group, which has acquired copyright to all songs written or recorded before 1923.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Forget MP3s, I wish it were possible to recover all the Microsoft ADPCM WAV music stuck on my inaccessible zip disks!
Guffah! Obviously you didn't read Section 1497201-309.5 of the CLFFE Act regarding 3D optical scans of cylinder phonographs!!! Man, that thing is explicit.
I would think RIAA would demand 3D scanner be illegal to own or operate as it is a device designed to circumvent "copy protection" known as "obsolescence."
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
It is strange how much I enjoy watching this . . .
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
No one in their right mind wants to recover anything with "microsoft" in the name.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
of "Baa Baa Black Sheep".
Set your phasers on "funky"!
ADPCM WAV is stupidly easy to decode. The WAV-RIFF container is well documented. ADPCM stands for adaptive differential pulse-code modulation which means it's just pulse code modulation but instead of storing the wave-form (like in raw PCM) it stores the differential. The adaptive part just means that you can scale the size of samples who's differential you are calculating. It's just basic compression techniques applied to PCM wrapped in a very straight forward header. Your only issue is going to come from the zip disks.
But listening to the recording by bouncing light off its surface and receiving the reflections is a lot like viewing the real Mona Lisa by bouncing ambient light off its surface and receiving the reflections in your eyeballs. It's your brain's fault that you can't see sound or smell colors or hear scents.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
I'm not up on my recording history but if memory serves there was no amplification, so you had to yell into a funnel to make the cylinder etching device leave an impression in the wax master.
crazy dynamite monkey
It's exactly like playing the recording, don't be stupid. It's NOT playing the cylinder; which is different.
Why would anyone go through the pointless effort of rebuilding a player? It's not like it's technically new, challenging, or interesting.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Now, if they had resurrected a recorder/player device that actually "played" the cylinder, that would be different.
The articles doesn't say but they may even have an original player. It doesn't really matter:
1) The cylinder is warped so it may not be possible to play it on the original device without some dubious restoration.
2) Even if it wasn't warped, actually playing the recording with an original or reconstructed device would almost certainly cause further damage to the recording. That may not be a big deal for some old 45 where there may still be thousands of surviving copies but Edison's cylinder is a one of a kind historical artifact.
The cylinder likely sat around for many decades unplayed, not because it couldn't be done but because the artifact was too precious to subject to that kind of treatment. With the optical scan, we get the best of both world: We get to hear every note and scratch and we get to preserve the cylinder for future generations as it came to our own.
Restricting the phrase "play [the] recording" to some arbitrary subset of playback devices is not very helpful, correct, or interesting. Why is this modded up?
http://www.nps.gov/edis/photosmultimedia/talking-doll-record-hear-the-recording.htm
That's good, except that page contains a Flash-based mp3 player. If you really want to listen to the mp3, follow this link: http://www.nps.gov/media/ner/avElement/edis-tenhp_edison_c_E-821-8_edis-1279_20110523_minus-5-semitones-and-eqd.mp3
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
The title says that "Scientists Play World's Oldest Commercial Recording." But actually, that's not true. From the summary: 123-year-old recording—etched into a warped metal cylinder and brought back to life after decades of silence by a three-dimensional (3D) optical scanning technique
Playing an optical scan of the worlds oldest commercial recording is not the same as playing the recording itself, any more than viewing a scan of the Mona Lisa is the same as viewing the real Mona Lisa, no matter how faithfully reproduced.
Now, if they had resurrected a recorder/player device that actually "played" the cylinder, that would be different.
I don't know. I think, by your logic, CD players don't actually play CD's. It might not play the cylinder the same way the original player did. But it's some kind of music player.