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Digitizing Rare Vinyl
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Aug 12, 2008 09:55 PM
from the quarter-taped-to-the-tone-arm dept.
from the quarter-taped-to-the-tone-arm dept.
eldavojohn writes "While the RIAA is busy changing its image to a snake eating its own tail, one man is busy digitizing out-of-print 78s. 'There's a whole world of music that you don't hear anymore, and it's on 78 RPM records,' he stated to Wired. Right now, you can find about 4,000 MP3s on his site, with no digital noise reduction implemented yet."
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Firsssssssst Posssssssst (Score:5, Funny)
Cue the purists saying: "But it is supposed to have hiss. That's part of its character."
Re:Firsssssssst Posssssssst (Score:5, Funny)
Cue the purists saying: "But it is supposed to have hiss. That's part of its character."
Is that before or after they yell at him for not storing as .wav or .flac?
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Re:Firsssssssst Posssssssst (Score:5, Insightful)
He's archiving as wavs, and simply making available the mp3s. I wouldn't want to host those wavs, do you?
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Re:Firsssssssst Posssssssst (Score:5, Insightful)
Why doesn't he contact archive.org. Archiving old material is their mission. I know they have the storage space and the bandwidth to handle it. Besides, I want to be able to torrent all the wav files. ; -)
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CDDB (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Firsssssssst Posssssssst (Score:5, Insightful)
Why doesn't everybody quit bitching about it and help the guy out? If you couldn't tell by the website linked (and by the runaway HTTP errors), this is obviously not this guy's job and it's just something he's doing to do it. He's sharing all this great stuff with us, why don't some of us offer to assist with bandwidth/technical stuff?
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Re:Firsssssssst Posssssssst (Score:4, Insightful)
And the inability to play them on 99% of personal music or other players for that matter.
Jesus, people can be ridiculously over the top in their support of 'open' formats.
You don't have to pay anything for listening to the MP3s, he doesn't have to pay anything for making them.
They are playable on the widest number of players possible, stop whinging.
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Re:Firsssssssst Posssssssst (Score:5, Insightful)
He's not charging anything, this is a guy with an old turntable, a Dell, the software that came with his SoundBlaster and a copy of MultiMediaJukebox to convert to MP3 and Roxio to burn to DVD.
It's just a guy working with what he has, and I seriously doubt he has the room or the time to create 4 different formats for every one of the 4000 tracks he has.
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Re:Firsssssssst Posssssssst (Score:5, Interesting)
Shhh we want to complain about how he doesn't do everything we want while giving us free music.
His copy of Mack the Knife is BEAUTIFUL. Sounds better than my 78 version. I want his copy :(
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Re:Firsssssssst Posssssssst (Score:4, Insightful)
It should be noted that what this guy is trying to do is bring a lot of the more obscure music into the modern age. While a 128kbps mp3 doesn't provide the best sound quality, at least it's listenable.
If you're that worried about sound quality, run down to your local used record shop and pick up the 78s yourself.
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Re:Firsssssssst Posssssssst (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Firsssssssst Posssssssst (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Firsssssssst Posssssssst (Score:5, Informative)
The record is not necessarily a lossy format. While pure digital (mp3s encoded at 320+) gives you a lot of good sound, it still can't compete with the warmth and depth of old fashioned vinyl. I realize a lot of people will disagree with this, but most of those people haven't listened to a record on a high quality turntable through a good amplifier playing on really good speakers.
The difference is highly noticeable.
Sadly, you'll find more folks listening through the speakers that came with their fancy new Dell claiming the difference can't be heard.
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Re:Firsssssssst Posssssssst (Score:5, Informative)
there is no real technical reason for vinyl to sound better
Sorry, but your link is woefully ignorant and has some really bad inaccuracies. For instance, "The vinyl surface is heated to several hundred degrees on playback, and repeat play of the same track should wait at least several hours until the vinyl has cooled". That is just utter bullshit. Not everything in that article is wrong, but there is much wefully inaccurate information in it.
The 44k samples per second of the CD limits the upper frequencies to 22kHz. Yes, that's higher than you can hear, but all the high frequency harmonics are gone. Those harmonics color the frequencies you CAN hear. Plus, the closer you get to that 22k, the more aliasing you have.
Analog mastering introduces noise, but digital mastering introduces rounding errors and aliasing.
If you have an analog medium from a digital master, or a digital medium from an analog master, you have the worst of both worlds, with th edisadvantages of both and the advantages of neither. The LP of Led Zeppelin's Presence will sound better than the CD (provided your turntable is good enough), while the CD of Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit will sound better than an LP version no matter how good your turntable is.
Digital has a far larger dynamic range than analog, but oddly the only place you see those dynamics is in the movies, and they're done badly there. I've wished for a "dynamics compression" module so I could watch a movie where the music wasn't thundering while the speech is berely audible. CDs, OTOH, almost never use the dynamic range they are capable of. I can NOT for the life of me figure out why the LP version of Boston's first album has so much more dynamics than the CD version; technically, the CD should have more dynamics. It's just a matter of bad remastering.
I got a few things wrong in Digital vs. analog- which is better? [kuro5hin.org] (tape speed for one), but whoever wrote that wiki you linked should read it.
Also if you want to digitize your own vinyl, read How to rip from vinyl or tape [kuro5hin.org]. I should have more strongly stressed in both articles that with analog, the quality of the playback device is of utmost importance for fidelity. Usually with analog equipment (although not always) the more you pay, the better it will sound, even to untrained old ears.
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Re:Firsssssssst Posssssssst (Score:5, Funny)
Cue the purists saying: "But it is supposed to have hiss. That's part of its character."
Is that before or after they yell at him for not storing as .wav or .flac?
50 years from now they'll say, "It's supposed to have compression artifacts. It garbles the hiss to signify the archaic bandwidth and storage capacity."
Actually they'll just think it, and their Facebook status will automatically update.
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Re:Firsssssssst Posssssssst (Score:5, Funny)
Cue the purists saying: "But it is supposed to have hiss. That's part of its character."
So you're saying they'd throw a hissy fit?
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The alternative is nothing. (Score:4, Insightful)
I was going to make a hissstorical pun but that's pointless.
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Re:The alternative is nothing. (Score:4, Funny)
Pointless perhaps, but hissterical nonetheless.
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Capture all aspects Re:Firsssssssst Posssssssst (Score:4, Interesting)
Then the purists should invent a way to digitally record all of the information. All the 3D characteristics of the record.
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Re:Firsssssssst Posssssssst (Score:5, Insightful)
That was pretty brilliant of the record companies, though, don't you think? Make the medium out of nice, soft vinyl, and make the worthless, replaceable needle out of the hardest mineral on the Mohs scale.
Brilliant, that is, if you want to maximize the rate at which the media wear out.
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Re:Firsssssssst Posssssssst (Score:4, Interesting)
When 78s first came out, the turntable was a windup mechanism and it used cactus needles. Later, the late 20's I think, they went to steel needles. I have very fond memories of listening to Enrico Caruso on my grandmothers windup victrola.
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Re:Firsssssssst Posssssssst (Score:5, Informative)
That was pretty brilliant of the record companies, though, don't you think? Make the medium out of nice, soft vinyl, and make the worthless, replaceable needle out of the hardest mineral on the Mohs scale.
Brilliant, that is, if you want to maximize the rate at which the media wear out.
I have mod points right now, and this post makes me wish there was a "-1 ignorant" rating.
You must be new here. Or at least not tech-savvy or young enough to never have thought about these things.
If you want to minimize wear between two friction surfaces the WORST thing to do is to make them both out of the same material. The best is to make one hard and the other soft. I don't know why this is true, but perhaps someone more versed in mechanical engineering and materials science can explain. In watches, for example (mechanical ones), the jeweled bearings you hear about are typically a sapphire or ruby (synthetic) cone in which a metal (steel or brass) pin rotates, not gem-against-gem. So diamond-against-vinyl makes sense (hard against soft). And not all phonograph needles were diamond; that was a relatively late phenomenon.
But far more important is how the medium -- the record itself in this case -- is manufactured. In some cases they were injection molded (rare), but more often they were pressed. Now think for a second, how are you going to make records, and do it inexpensively enough that you can sell them? Make them out of metal, like steel? And then what, cut each groove? Probably not (although that's exactly how the original lacquer disks were made). A moldable plastic sounds like a good idea. And that's how the majority of disks were (and still are) made: take a hot lump of vinyl, about the size and shape of a hockey puck, and press it between two hot disks of metal into which are carefully machined (ie, cut) grooves. Use enough pressure and the vinyl will replicate nearly every nuance of the mold. Although you can do this with a hard plastic, plastics are all pretty soft, and hard plastics have a regrettable tendency to break easily because they're brittle (like the old 78 RPM disks).
Now, you can argue that perhaps a less expensive material could be used instead of diamond for the needle, and was for a long time (eg, garnet), but the materials cost of industrial diamonds that weigh a few micrograms is next to nothing. The expense is in the shaping (playback needles aren't just pointed cones, at least good ones weren't) since that requires highly specialized equipment and skilled labor.
So, yes, it is brilliant to use diamond and vinyl. Did you ever see black dust or ribbon coming off of a record from the needle -- at least for one that was in proper alignment and not being dragged crosswise? I never did. And I still have my very playable record collection. The wear in records was not from removal of material, as with many wear mechanisms, but in gradual reshaping of the groove as the needle passed through. Thus the progress over time to lighter and lighter contact pressures and lighter and lighter cantilevers, with lighter and lighter moving masses -- eg, the moving magnet approach.
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Re:Firsssssssst Posssssssst (Score:5, Insightful)
They aren't really purists. They are audio snobs. There's a difference.
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Re:Firsssssssst Posssssssst (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, but without the up-modding of the post, would we really know how fucking awesome it really is?
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So who's going to stop this guy first? (Score:4, Insightful)
I hope this guy plans on making a torrent with his stuff
Re:So who's going to stop this guy first? (Score:5, Insightful)
What pisses me off to no end about that is that they'd rather let a rare piece of art vanish into oblivion rather than have it digitized and spread to preserve its existance. If we can't make money out of it, it's not worth existing.
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Other archival projects (Score:5, Funny)
The Library of Congress has an archival project:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1216161 [npr.org]
This is going the other way - from digital to 78's. Shellac 78's appear to be the best archival format.
Re:Other archival projects (Score:5, Insightful)
Stop quoting nonsense you heard from your grandpa.
Film is a terrible archival medium, except for maybe silver based black and white film. It fades, the color changes, is easily damaged, and the original degrades when copied. George Lucas has spent $millions carefully restoring the archived Star Wars films, and they're a lot less than 50-60 years old. Film over 50 years old usually takes heavy processing to be even watchable.
On the other hand, digital archives are trivial to copy losslessly, so there's no need for any physical media to last for the length of the archival time.
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Digitizing vinyl (Score:5, Insightful)
In my many years in Radio, I've digitized a considerable amount of music from LP's and 45's. In most cases, I could get moderately scratchy cuts to sound almost new. The transformation is pretty impressive, to say the least! However, I wouldn't even THINK of compressing it to MP3 until AFTER I had run it through an audio clean-up utility, like Cool Edit or Audacity.
I wonder how badly the MP3 compression affects the music with all of that hiss and crackle taking-up so much bandwidth? Also, how much would the compression artifacts affect the ability of the clean-up utility to do its job?
I think it is a laudable thing to preserve some of this priceless music! Kudos!
Re:Digitizing vinyl (Score:5, Interesting)
I realize you're modded off topic but...
Noise Removal - Audacity Wiki:
http://www.audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php?title=Noise_Removal [audacityteam.org]
There are a pile of resources for Audacity, the wiki is one of the first places I'd look and, in this case, did.
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Re:Digitizing vinyl (Score:4, Interesting)
Yep, I've used that, on audio from old TV captures, or digitising audio cassettes recorded from the radio 30 years ago. Get the latest beta 1.35 of Audacity, the noise removal "effect" is much better than 1.2. Good for getting rid of hiss and hum.
But if I was archiving "important" music I probably would invest in a commercial solution.
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sovmusic.ru (Score:4, Informative)
A Russian has been up to this since the mid-90s, digitizing old Soviet LPs (1930s on up) and putting them on his site (http://www.sovmusic.ru/english/ [sovmusic.ru]) for free.
It's a very extensive collection, and is worth a look, regardless of what you think about Russia's past or current behavior.
Most 78's are NOT VINYL (Score:5, Informative)
Most 78's (there are exceptions, including the very famous and historically important V-discs) are not vinyl.
They are shellac, or rather a mixture of shellac, wax, slate, and a cotton or paper filler.
I personally believe that the decline of the music industry is directly related to the replacement of shellac with vinyl, and that the RIAA must remedy this decline immediately.
Re:Most 78's are NOT VINYL (Score:4, Informative)
The paper filler was useful in some cases - it kept the record from falling apart, so it would still play (albeit extra-noisily) if cracked.
There was a spectrum of record pressing quality back then, too. I have some Billy Holiday records on Columbia that are nearly unplayable due to surface noise, yet many other records sound very clean.
Some later 78s were pressed with vinyl, such as Elvis stuff. It sounds very good.
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Be careful and use piezo cells, not magnetic ones (Score:4, Interesting)
Surprisingly, if you use a piezo, heavy cell (not suitable to read stereo records), you will get a much better sound, and almost no hiss. I got very good results at a time from a Dual 1010 turnable, unfortunately out of order now :-(
I also have some Jack Hylton songs that do not seem to be present on his Internet tribute site (Bogey wail, Sarita...), for whoever is interested. I guess they are legally in the public domain now, as all of them date from before WW2.
Re:Be careful and use piezo cells, not magnetic on (Score:4, Interesting)
It is not the cartridge itself that matters. The shape of the needle changed from the 78 size to a smaller one for the microgroove recordings. (33 + 1/3 and 45 )
Yes. These cells commonly used a commutable needle : one for 78 rpm and another for the microgroove, and a level allowed to switch from one to the other. Needless to say, I supposed the right needle was used.
That being said, piezo cartridges and magnetic ones accepted at a time these dual needles, so using the right needle is necessary, but here not sufficient :-)
Of course for best fidelity the single use steel needle is preferred....:)
That might be. When I was very young we used to have a "Peter Pan" portable mechanical 78rpm player and we had a box of needles, which had to be changed rather frequently. I had the surprise, when reading its user's manual to see that the manufacturer recommendend changing the needle after each record, which seems unbelievable. I always wondered if that really applied to steel needles, or just to former bamboo needles, which I never had a chance to see.
I still have a wind up gramophone of maybe twenties or thirties vintage that uses these. No amplification, no electricity.
What makes me sade evert time there is a technology change is the know-how that it lost with it forever - except perhaps a for a few passionates which allow it some survival. In french brocantes, it is common to find objects for sale, the function of which is ununderstandable, even for its preceding owners :-/
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i just posted this link 3 days ago (Score:5, Interesting)
in the thread on the tragedy of the anticommons, but it seems even more relevant to this topic
on the subject of intellectual property and the rare souls reviving old media through blood sweat and tears [aintitcool.com], the filmmaker vincent gallo [imdb.com] said this four years ago:
bottom line: revive old media, bring renewed attention AND SALES to a long forgotten artist and piece of music, and expect the corporate intellectual property assholes to punish you for effort
thats the state of intellectual property today
Re:i just posted this link 3 days ago (Score:5, Interesting)
Thanks for that. When the Universal studio went up in smoke this year, it did not destroy films but it DID destroy the only known copies of any of their music from the 50s and earlier. How much money do you think they'll make from the ash? "Not a whole lot" is my guess. They also lost a lot of remastered early movies, where the originals are too artsy to be worth remastering again, going by $ value alone. Again, how much do you think they'll get from the smouldering remnants?
Now, if those works had been generally available under public domain, those artists would be better known and maybe, if any works are still under honest copyright, have greater market value. But, no, they wanted their hard cash up-front and in big quantities, even if that meant risking losing everything. They don't care about what society has lost, they only care about what they can take for themselves.
It might be better if there was staggered copyright whereby rights automatically revert from whoever owns the rights to the creator of the work after 40 years, and they (and their estate) get to hold the rights for a further 10 or 20 years. It wouldn't stop the corporate abuses, but it would restrict them, and it would lessen the need any actual artist might have for a longer copyright, because they'd be earning five to ten times as much per sale towards the end of the copyright lifetime.
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Removing hiss and pops (Score:5, Interesting)
As a suggestion, how about digitizing the songs several times and then using the redundant data to recreate the originals with no hiss or pop.
As I understand it, pop is sometimes caused by buildup and sudden release of static electricity. This means that the pops will be in different places for different digitizations and can therefore be recognized and accounted for. Scratches, on the other hand...
Hiss is stochastic noise and would average out over several recordings.
It should be straightforward to use a correlation coefficient correction to bring all the recordings into "phase", then use a processing algorithm to remove most of the artifacts.
The artifacts that remain can be removed using techniques more suited to single-images; ie - filtering to remove hiss and pop.
Re:Removing hiss and pops (Score:4, Interesting)
If static is indeed a significant source of noise it should be possible to reduce it by processing multiple playbacks of the recording. But I'm afraid that much of the noise in a typical record is already part of the medium in the form of tiny scratches and will not average out. You would need two or more imprints of the same master to fix that.
Bringing the recordings into phase is not as straightforward as you describe. You need to track the variations in rotation rate and continuously stretch and compress the signal based on cross-correlation. But I'm sure there's a plugin that already does it.
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Some of it isn't politcally correct (Score:4, Informative)
some of the song lyrics are racist and at least one of them is x-rated and people have to request it.
The early 20th century had a lot of raw, dry, dark, and offensive humor in their songs. People who didn't grow up during those days will find it horribly offensive, esp during the WWII anti-Japanese years or during when segregation was still a law and songs mocked African-Americans.
Just a warning for people who are easily offended, some of these songs might offend them. So do us all a big favor if you are one of them and don't listen to those songs. Monty Python had a similar warning on their show for the same reasons.
The QUAD underground (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:why digitize vinyl? (Score:5, Insightful)
And before something about noise reduction pops up. Noise reduction takes time. He rather put the mp3s up first. Notice the 'yet'. If you really want a song to be cleaner, clean it up yourself and then send the mp3 back to him.
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Re:why digitize vinyl? (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, that isn't exactly what the summary says. The summary says the 78s are out of print, which is no surprise because 78s aren't produced anymore. There's definitely a ton of music on there that is available commercialy in modern formats. For instance, he has "Caravan," by Duke Ellington. That's an extremely famous jazz tune, and I can't imagine there's ever a time when you couldn't buy a commercial recording of it. You can buy it right now on Amazon in mp3 format [amazon.com] for 99 cents, or on a CD reissue [amazon.com]. I don't know if it's exactly the same performance or not.
The Wired article also has a discussion of the copyright status of these songs, which basically amounts to, "nobody's sued him so far." I guarantee you that the composition of Caravan [wikipedia.org], for instance, is still in copyright -- Tizol and Ellington wrote it in 1936, so the only way it would have passed into the public domain would have been if the copyright owner had failed to renew it -- but it was a valuable commercial property (still is), and I'm sure they did renew it. (Nothing from after 1922 has expired in the US except by failure to do the renewal that used to be required.) I don't know about the copyright on the sound recording (is the duration different?), but I'd guess it's still also in copyright.
If copyright law in the US was sane, a composition from 1936 would be in the public domain, but that doesn't change the fact that the law is not sane, it is what it is, and these recordings are not all out of print or out of copyright.
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Re:why digitize vinyl? (Score:5, Interesting)
Sadly you're right - US copyright law is messed up.
From: http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/copyright.php [ucsb.edu]
"Sound recordings were not eligible for federal copyright protection until 1972 and recordings made prior to this date are only protected by state and common-law copyright. All Edison cylinders are presumed to be in the public domain as the assets of Edison Records were transferred to the National Park Service, a federal agency. Other American sound recordings made prior 1972 may or may not be protected by state laws or common-law copyright. Foreign cylinders are all public domain in the country of production and are also presumed to be in the public domain in the United States.
The nature of the various state laws and differing interpretations of these laws in state courts means that the legal status of many early recordings is unclear. The passage of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 reiterated that all recordings made prior to February 15, 1972 are only eligible for protection under state laws until February 15, 2067, when federal law preempts state law and they enter the public domain. While the Sonny Bono law was intended primarily to extend the copyright protection to the soon-to-expire copyrights of multinational corporations and heirs to songwriters, in effect it meant that all early recordings, no matter what their commercial potential, historical importance, or availability as reissues (with the exception of Edison Recordings) may be protected for well over 150 years after their creation. This is in stark contrast to the original copyright law passed in 1790 which granted a 14-year term of copyright (renewable for another 14 years) or the copyright law in effect for other types of publications when these cylinders were recorded which granted a copyright or 28 years, renewable for another 14 year (28 years after 1909). Not a single person who composed a song recorded on these cylinders or sang into the recording horn is alive today, which suggests that the original intent of copyright to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" has been completely usurped by the Sonny Bono law."
This happens to be another incredible collection of old recordings: http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/ [ucsb.edu]
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Re:why digitize vinyl? (Score:4, Informative)
If you really want a song to be cleaner, clean it up yourself and then send the mp3 back to him.
Cleaning an MP3 is rather dubious since the final result will have been encoded, decoded, and re-encoded to a lossy format. The low frequency range of 78's makes it feasible, yet difficult to palate. Trust me, been there, done that.
If you're aiming for a noise floor of a relatively modern recording, even from the 70's, you're looking at about 18+dB reduction. Removing large amounts of hiss is best done in layers with 6-7dB reduction each, so we're talking at least three passes through a good multiband noise gate, each layer leaving artifacts of its own.
It's actually very interesting doing the processes together in realtime. At first it didn't make sense to me that they even made realtime multiband NR, but the best settings for each layer vary depending on the dynamics of the content. The first layer deals with just the louder segments, so you use different settings if they tend to be a vocalist or a drum, for example. The second and third deal with lower level sounds and don't vary quite so much, but the amounts of noise each layer will reduce is a matter of trial-and-error.
In the end, you leave just enough hiss behind to mask the artifacts. Any artifacts present in the source file have to be masked too, so they greatly affect the amount of hiss that can be removed. He definitely should be archiving to a lossless format if he ever expects anyone to work on them at a later date.
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Re:poor server (Score:4, Insightful)
Make him? Err... You should *thank* him. Really, WTF?
Maybe, you know, ask NICELY or something. But "make him?"
Anyhow, I was looking and hoping I'd find some Leadbelly. There are a few rare cuts that I don't have yet. In the meantime I'll enjoy what he's got going on though.
Make him? (I still can't get over that people would actually think that way.)
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Re:Digitizing rare vinyl with a scanner (Score:5, Informative)
I was expecting someone putting a record into a flatbed scanner
That's been tried [slashdot.org], and it sort of works. But ordinary scanners don't have enough resolution. The Library of Congress has a scanner that does. [loc.gov] They image the disc at a resolution of 1 micro per pixel, which yields 8 GB or so of imagery. Then they have software which can reconstruct the audio from the image.
Not only is this useful for fragile, unique records, but it will work on cracked or scratched ones. It's even possible to reconstruct a broken record if you have all the pieces.
The current scanner only works for horizontal recording; it can't read depth. So it won't work on vertically recorded records (Edison) or stereo (45/45 Westrex has two components 90 degrees apart.) They're working on that.
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Re:78's, 16's... (Score:5, Informative)
And another part too...
The 78 RPM records weren't on Vinyl - it's Shellac, which is a lot more sensitive than Vinyl.
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Re:Speaking Of Rare..... (Score:4, Interesting)
Been there, done that.
What you need to get as a basic setup, is a modern 33.3/45/78 turntable with a ceramic cartridge (or as modern as you can get). Those late 70s and early 80s turntable with strobe speed control is excellent because accurate speed is important.
Try not to use a magnetic cartridge because you will probably need to amplify it. If you amplify it, or for that matter, click the LP/Record option on most audio rippers, you will be applying an eq curve called an 'RIAA EQ Curve'.
What this does is to alter the sound as it is being ripped to disk. This curve is used to help get the tonal balance of records, but was only introduced in the 1930s, so any pre-WWII recordings probably don't have it as the RIAA curve was used in the process of cutting the disk. You'll find that those early records were made 'direct-to-disk' and pressed as such. Having a cheaper ceramic cartridge connected direct avoids this easily. Ceramic cartridges also have a higher output (more volume) and is better suited to sound cards in this case.
So try not to use an amp (or if you have to, then get one where you can switch the RIAA curve out), and plug the T/table into the soundcard. There's lots of free audio ripper software out there and you should get it digitized with no probs.
Don't forget to clean each side - lukewarm water with a little natural soap, 1" paint brush to apply - get the brush bristles into the grooves. Rinse. Don't dry it with anything, but shake it dry. Don't get the label wet. Water on the grooves is ok and some actually flood the grooves when they record as it dampens the needle. :)
The tone arm weight has to be heavy, about 5 grams if you can manage it - or put a small coin on top of the headshell. Experiment with a non-critical record and make sure that the needle is free to move and not jammed up into the cartridge.
Now when you've done all of that, put up a website and let me know the URL
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