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What if you pass it a high-res photo of a vinyl record? There ought to be a transcoder plugin for that lying around somewhere!
by vanviegen 5y ago
What if you pass it a high-res photo of a vinyl record? There ought to be a transcoder plugin for that lying around somewhere!
- xwdv 5y agoImagine someday we can take photos from slices of a brain and use it replay a person’s memories, and the program used for that would of course be ffmpeg.
- sva_ 5y agoIt sometimes creeps me out to consider how much information may one day be extracted from artifacts we create today.
- dan-robertson 5y agoThis can be done, and indeed was done for an ancient photograph of an ancient record that no longer existed. In that case I think they used some photoshop magic to ‘unspiral’ the groove and something else to decode the image. The result wasn’t super high quality.
- bradrn 5y agoI’m surprised this worked at all. Do you have a link?
- caseysoftware 5y agoYes, NPR covered it ~15 years ago: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11851842 https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=118518... I worked on an earlier version of this project where we actually had to play the albums but we also took high res (300 dpi tifs) of the individual records with the hope that we'd never have to physically touch them again. So I'll claim contributing to this effort. ;)
- rokweom 5y agoAny particular reason they couldn't use one of these laser vinyl turntables?
- dredmorbius 5y ago"It looks like somebody just got hungry and took a bite out of it," says Haber. He has positioned the record on a turntable and fitted the broken piece back into place, like it's a jigsaw puzzle. "If we spun this thing fast, the piece would come flying off, you know, and maybe hit somebody," he says. Paragraph 2 of the link.
- caseysoftware 5y agoIn that particular case, definitely. More generally, it's risk. Every time an archivist touches the media - no matter gloves, a clean environment, the care applied, etc - there's a risk of altering or even damaging it. In our case, the eventual goal was to keep the ever-deteriorating originals in nitrogen-filled vaults. Therefore, if you can avoid having to touch it often (or ever), then you've managed to protect it better, probably longer, and more cheaply.
- dredmorbius 5y agoRight. Static, high-resolution photography (or other imaging) is about the least-invasive, lowest-risk options available.
- Kye 5y agoVinyl starts as a poor material for recording music and only gets worse with age and use. Take a picture if it on old film and develop it with old techniques, and you end up with the worst possible recording medium. I'm impressed they got anything from it.
- dredmorbius 5y agoThere's a recording medium which is worse than a photograph of vinyl. None. If an old photo is what you've got, make the best at extracting from it.
- Kye 5y agoThis seems like an argument against something I didn't say in the comment you replied to. Maybe I misunderstood you.
- dredmorbius 5y agoThere's at least a plausible interpretation of your earlier comment that the attempt was futile or without merits. The OP makes clear that this was the only viable way of extracting information. 1 >>> 0. Also, as a sufficiently early recording (anything before the mid-1940s), the medium would have been shellac or wax rather than vinyl. Shellac especially is immensely fragile and prone to shatter when handling.
- Kye 5y agoYour interpretation was incorrect.
- dredmorbius 5y agoYour expression was unclear. I'm not telling you what you meant. I'm telling you what I heard, and, in reponse to your implied question, why I'd responded as I had.
- RF_Savage 5y agoThe tech to do it is almost there. https://www.windytan.com/2017/07/gramophone-audio-from-photograph.html?m=1 https://www.windytan.com/2017/07/gramophone-audio-from-photo...