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

[Steven at simplycircus.com (Steven Santos)]

http://www.lp2cd.com/
---
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 Tue, Apr 7, 2015 at 12:12 AM, John Abreau <jabr at blu.org> wrote:
> 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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>
> --
> John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix
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