78rpm Records Digitized

Parker Higgens made a really cool Twitter bot using this project, which creates a little clip of a random record playing:

https://twitter.com/78_sampler?s=21

Thank you for posting! I immediately found some old 78's that I had lost, it's great to listen to them again.

I wish I had not sold my 78's to Half Price Books a few years back. I had a couple hundred records, some of which had probably never been played. I found all of them in a house we bought right after getting married.

They were a mix of old Country music, Broadway musical shows, Jewish songs, and Big Band stuff. I always intended to digitize them before selling them but my phonograph only played 33 1/3 rpm and 45 rpm and had no facility for direct recording so everything had to be done through a connection to my pc.

I bought a USB interface to a phonograph and recorded about 40 of my albums and some that I bought at Half Price Books because I really wanted a particular song. After recording each album, I used Audacity to compensate for the speed difference and was able to get some great music.

It was a huge project though and I was working 7 days a week during this period so the spare time to complete it was just not available. That is why I decided to take them to Half Price Books. I knew that I would get almost nothing for them and that there was likely some very good music in the collection but I decided that there was a better chance for someone else to see them on the racks and tackle the job.

I love old music. It takes me back to my childhood in the same way that a smell can transport me to a specific point in time. I'm glad that someone has chosen to preserve this music in an accessible format and to make it available so others can hear those timeless compositions.

Support archive.org if you have the resources.

> The trouble with digitizing analog mediums (especially vinyl) is how much your equipment can alter the sound. Given a different tonearm, cartridge, amp, etc, the same record can sound very different.

Would a scan done with a laser turntable[1] be better? The wikipedia article mentions that it produces a much better capture than regular tonearms, although they are much more susceptible to dust.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_turntable

The title sparked a memory of someone using a flatbed scanner and some software back in 2002 to extract audio from scanned images of record tracks.

https://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~springer/DigitalNeedle/index.html

Results were interesting though fairly unintelligible. Practicality aside, wonder if/how much this method could be improved today?