Seen on FreeCycle/Seattle:
Hello, my friend has recently come into approximately 30,000 records(!) many of which are old enough as to be public domain, i.e. their copyrights are expired. He has offered to let me digitize them so that they may be distributed, to undermine the record companies and their patterns of re-releasing albums periodically in a “remastered” cd so that the copyrights never expire. I have the computer and software necessary to digitize these records (which include crazy rare ethnic and folk music, as well as odd “mood” atmospheric music), but need a record player with component outputs, ie a linelevel output, so that i can hook it up to my soundcard. I can afford a needle, I just need a decent record player. Help the world, give me the old record player in your garage. Recordings will be distributed on an ftp site and on peer to peer programs (people actually do use these for legitimate purposes!).
Reply directly (I’m not the guy doing this.)
21 Comments
I don’t have a record player but I thought the ads on your site were quite interesting so clicked on them ;)
[ed: thanks!]
Aside from the suspicious hotmail username, one might question when the public will see the output of this project. i’m not great at math, but assuming each record is 45 minutes long, doesn’t this guy have about 2.5 years of continual recording ahead of him? Furthermore, never mind the donation of a record player…if he encodes it at 128 kbps, isn’t he going to need about 1.3 terabytes of storage space?
plug in your own numbers: http://waxy.org/projects/mp3calc/
Well, as far as email addresses go, either they’re all suspicious or none of them are: I wouldn’t have chosen that one, no matter what my interests. And not to quibble, but with your email address, I can’t reply directly: I think you raise a good point.
My guess is he’s never done this before: ripping from vinyl takes a lo more time that ripping from CD (it’s like painting your house: surface prep is a big part of the job).
What makes more sense would be to distribute this out to as many people as want to volunteer to rip a few sides and share them out.
I’ll suggest that.
While I don’t have a spare one for you, you can go to fry’s radioshack and get a phono preamp for around 15 bucks that’ll let you plug the phono level outs of a turntable into the line in of your computer (Via an RCA->Mini Y adapter). Turntables with line level outputs are much harder to come by, especially in the thrift store sense. Speaking of thrift stores, you can get a turntable for 20 bucks there, too. :)
Truly, the email address shows very bad judgement. The comment about farming out the records is a good one. It might be expensive however. I would suggest sending out packs of 100 to volunteers and getting back CDs or DVDs with the files on them. The return of the records might be accompanied by a re-imbursment for the initial shipping if the volunteer so desires.
The comment that ‘many’ of the records ‘may’ be in the public domain is a bit scary. Does that mean every track would have to be researched to determine their legality?
Sounds like a worthy project. Nothing is simple though.
This guy needs to do some research on digitizing! If we’re talking making decent vinyl rips, then the last thing he want’s to use is his *internal* computer sound card, unless we *like* hearing computer tweedle noises in the backgroud. A bit more sophistication than is required to rip CDs is needed to make this less than a joke project.
I wonder: with a good needle and electronics and an excessive sampling rate, could one rip 33 1/4 RPMs at 45 or 78, then change the playback rate to get it back to normal? 2x vinyl ripping!
If the copyrights are expired I would assume these to be 78s. This would assume that the person needs a turntable capable of handling 78s. 2nd hand stores would be best for these.
I’ve done some record to Cd and mp3 transfers and it takes a long time and a lot of work. While one side of a 78 may only take 5 minutes to transfer (approximately 10 records per hour, both sides), it takes time to edit them. My best reccomendation is to pick out about 100 and start with those. You may find it easier to record a group of songs and then edit out each using a wave editor.
Needless to say that this is exhausting and after the first 100 you may change your mind about doing all 30 000. It would take about 3 000 hours (or 1000 days at 3 hours per day) of work just to transfer them!
for about 30 bucks you should be able to get a iMic which sheilds the audio from computer noises and works as a preamp of sorts. I plug a record player straight into the imic, and use the included finalVinyl software to record it.
You should look into a good turntable and pre amp if you are serious or a turntable with line out like the Stanton str8 series or maybe a Denon check out Prosound for deals .Also I make MP3s with a tidy little program called AR Wizard found at nowsmart.com unless you use a good turntable with a wide frequency range needle I wouldnt even bother.
I’d suggest that the gentleman talk to Jon Noring (jon@noring.name), who is working with hte Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org/) to digitize 78RPM, LP, etc originals.
Out of 30,000 or so records, they’re probably quite a few that aren’t public domain. Without knowing the era of the collection it’s hard to say, but there may be quite a few valuable, but readily available records. Meaning the original pressing of the recording is quite valuable (like, say, an original Robert Johnson 78 of Terraplane Blues), but the recordings are easily available elsewhere. Sell these collectible records, and you might be able to put together a budget for archiving the obscure ones.
And if this guy is serious about archiving, he really should get a record cleaning machine, like a VPI or Nitty Gritty. This will make a world of difference is playback quality.
It would also be a good idea to try and locate some kind of software that could take a large full-record recording and split it into tracks. It’s possible to do that manually, but it takes quite a while.
You must be kidding me fool! I spin redkids nonstop, but I’m not even patient enuf to encode a few hundred trax. Forget about gettin with ur hunnies, you’ll be changin redkids all day and night.
GET SOME THIRD-WORLD LABOR ON THIS BIATCH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Post your Malaysia contract online and I’ll be a one to donate for the child labor to get this mofo finished. That’s the way to get things done sucka!
Heard about this on boing boing. Sop we’ve got an extra record player, which you are welcome to have…but I’ve some experience with digitizing and its the most mind-numbingly boring thing on earth, like seaching for aliens with a radiotelescope. So why don’t you do what the SETIO people do (only more manually), and create a list of people who are willing to digitize a crate of records on their home systems (MOST people have a computer with an audio input, or some USB equivalent, and all you have to do is connect the stereo output to the computer and use a freeware like audacity to digitize the thing.) Sending strangers a crate and trusting them to digitize the records is more likely to get you through this job than trying to do it yourself. EVEN if 3/4 of these volunteers flaked, and you only got 7,500 records digitized, that’s more than you will get done in your lifetime…And by your own admission, the record company isn’t going to just sit by and let you do this in a lifetime. You’ve got to get them digitized NOW.
Are you sure the records are actually in the public domain?
Copyright law for sound recordings is even more messed up than
copyright law for other stuff.
(This is partly the federal government didn’t bring them
into the federal copyright regime until 1972; prior to that,
they were covered, and often still are covered, under a variety
of state laws.)
Some legal experts state that there are virtually no sound
recordings in the public domain now, except for government
works (even if the recordings were made
before 1923, the usual cutoff date for most media) and
that copyrights for sound recordings won’t expire in the US
for at least another few decades. See Stephen Fishman’s
book _The Public Domain_, or
http://www.pdinfo.com/record.htm
for one online site’s opinion.
public domain or not, do it anyways! But yeah, you don’t want a stock computer soundcard. You can get a decently cheap one from Friday, November 19, 2004 at 3:32 PM | Permalink