[Discuss] [OT] digitizing old 78rpm records? ELP laser turntable services?

[John Abreau]

Doesn't do 78s; it only plays at 33.3 and 45 rpm. And the needle would
probably destroy the 78s while trying to play them.


On Mon, Apr 6, 2015 at 11:34 PM, Steven Santos <Steven at simplycircus.com>
wrote:

> For $40 this might be worth trying:
>
> http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0029QRA1U/transfermymusic-20
>
>
> ---
> Steven Santos
> Director
> Simply Circus, Inc.
> 86 Los Angeles Street
> Newton, MA 02458
>
> P: 617-527-0667
> F: 617-934-1870
> E: Steven at SimplyCircus.com
>
>
> On Sun, Apr 5, 2015 at 9:45 AM, Kent Borg <kentborg at borg.org> wrote:
> > The frustrating (or amazing) thing about 78s is they are not
> "information"
> > devices they are "industrial": They have big grooves that make big
> > excursions and they whip by really fast, all to make noise rather
> directly.
> > There is no amplifier in an old Victrola, yet it makes a room full of
> sound.
> > The 78 record isn't just information, it is a big part of the sound
> > reproduction system, and playing it is destructive. But you knew that.
> >
> > I have a related problem, I inherited a zillion slides from my parents'
> > world travels. How to digitize them? There were two obvious routes: use
> some
> > service or buy a slide scanner. Pricing the services was scary--not bad
> for
> > a few but crazy expensive for a lot. Looking that reviews of scanners I
> was
> > disappointed with the quality, and they can be slow.
> >
> > So I took the homebrew approach and crafted my own "scanner". Right now
> > there is a lot of competition in the high-end camera market, so I bought
> the
> > fanciest DSLR any normal person should buy with his/er own money, and I
> am
> > taking pictures of the slides.
> >
> > A macro lens, a light box, a tripod, a black plastic food container with
> a
> > hole in it upside down to move the slide up from the less-than-perfect
> > diffuser (use distance to diffuse and throw small patterning out of
> focus),
> > a remote release, wooden bracing to hold the camera more steady...and a
> > bunch of futzing...and I can see the film grain.
> >
> > My wife and I can digitize slides as fast as we can individually pull
> them
> > out of a Carousel, puff off the dust, place them in the upside down food
> > container, and return them. In about the time that it would take to pack
> up
> > a batch to send out, we are done with that batch. Well, not done yet,
> but on
> > a recent long weekend visit to the ol' homestead we digitized over four
> > thousand slides, and that's a good fraction of the total
> >
> >
> > As for 78s, I might be crazy...but a 78 side usually only runs
> 3-something
> > minutes of low-fidelity sound. There isn't much fundamental information
> > there, a high quality photo (or several stitched) of a record side might
> > capture it all. Then it is a "simple matter of programming" to recover
> the
> > sound! You could even crop out the label details for your metadata.
> >
> > Googling "optical record groove software"...
> >
> >   Amazing recovering of audio from paper recordings:
> >
> https://mediapreservation.wordpress.com/2012/06/20/extracting-audio-from-pictures/
> >
> >   A hacker who demonstrated he could get something audible from LP
> photos:
> > http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~springer/DigitalNeedle/index.html
> >
> > There are plenty of general purpose open source imaging processing
> libraries
> > available, maybe there is specific useful software available from the
> Irene
> > project??
> >
> >
> > -kb
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> >
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John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix
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