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

[Kent Borg]

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