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

[Steven Santos]

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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