Ripping Vinyl Via Your Scanner?

An anonymous reader writes "This site describes a method of extracting audio off of scanned images of vinyl records. Kazaa vinyl swapping is on it's way!" While this method creates exceptionally noisy samples, you can definitely hear the underlying music.

Laser Turntable

[ArchieBunker]

Serious audiophiles would simply buy a laser turntable to minimize the wear and tear. Although it probably sounds more like a cd than anything.

http://www.elpj.com/

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[account_deleted]

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The angles of stereo records are well known

[isdnip]

The original author failed to research how vinyl records work, something that "everybody" knew 20 years ago, before CDs.

Now to see if my memory still works. Mono LPs used horizontal modulation; the needle moved back and forth within the groove. Stereo can be viewed two ways. Vertical is difference (L-R), horizontal is sum of the L+R. Viewed differently, the two diagonal walls of the groove are the two channels.

A flatbed scanner can only see the horizontal, so it might work a bit with mono, but it won't work too well! However do note that some very, very expensive ($10k+?) new turntables actually do use optical "needles" to track the groove without touching it. Talk about low tracking force!

real people

[squarefish]

ok, so I'm aging myself- but many years ago on "Real People" they had a guy that could recognize an album or song just by looking at the grooves, his specialty was classical, but he knew everything and could easily identify the song just by looking at the grooves. This is basically doing a similar type of thing.

My Dual Turntable sounds much better.

[puto]

I have a Dual direct drive turntable I bought in 1986 with a diamond stylus. It sounds great and I have 'ripped' all my LPs to mp3 a long time ago. Didn't need to stick em in my scanner, didn't need to stitch any images together.

Besides I would not stick any of my 12 maxi singles of 1980s Billy Idol in the scanner to be scraped against the glass. ;).

My NAD stereo has been faithfully updated over the years but the turntable remains the same. And I do use it on the odd occasion and sometimes do pick up an ablum at the flea market.

Puto

Re:Optical record players - found some

[jcl5m]

A quick jump of Google turned up a couple optical record players.

http://www.elpj.com/main.html [elpj.com]

Still, it's pretty darn neat to do it with a scanner.

Hypothetical Question

[theNote]

Hypothetical Question:

Lets say this is for real (not really sure about that one)

Lets also assume it eventually extracts 100% clear as a bell.

Would it be legal to trade/sell pictures of albums?

computer media?

[cosyne]

Can this be done with computer media? Could you just scan in two halves of a broken cdrom and extract the info? (Or has the NSA been able to do this for years and not told us about it? They just dig the CD shards out of your trash, reassemble the electron micrscope output, and read off the bits.) He said he had to scan the record in multiple sections, so it might not matter if those sections are all attached to each other.

On a related note, is there any technology for using a high res laser scanner to read records? It might actually sound decent.

Re:Laser Turntable

[dfung]

Back in the days before CDs, I believe there may have been a super-esoteric turntable that tried to do this (or perhaps it was just a press release gracing a CES show).

It's actually a good idea that doesn't have to sound like a CD. CD music=digitized music. A laser turntable can be used as a precise no-contact ANALOG reader.

In fact, they're obsolete now, but 12" laserdiscs are doing exactly this - the disk is an optical medium, but the signal on that disk is analog, not digital.

Now, you can't overcome the limits of the analog recording process, the cool thing about analog systems are that you can keep making them better and better. There is always hope.

David Fung

Since when....

[dcigary]

...does an interplotation of images to sound produce regular friction noise? (The background noise that has a regular beat to it).

C'mon. There's lots of filters out there that will introduce these types of effects into a sound file.

Hoax.

It's been tried on oil paintings!

[Richard Kirk]

People have tried to look for similar patterns in the surface of oil paintings. They hoped that ambient sound might vibrate the canvas, and the artist's palette knife would act as the recording needle. I don't think it worked: I have had a quick dig on the Web, but can't find any mention of it.