Digital Imaging Camera Conversion: Records To MP3

Peter Alyea, a digital conservation specialist at the Library of Congress, scans a record from the 1930s. Image Credit: Nell Boyce/NPR

Digital Imaging Camera Conversion: Records To MP3

Digital imaging technology is an amazing tool. It provides biometric information to help keep us safe, it reads symbologies so that we can get information delivered to us through a camera and sofware (up to 20 seconds of low-res video on our cellphone screens - a 4 meg file), and now this type of technology can take a picture of a round phonograph record and deliver a sound reproduction via a MP3 file converted from reading the grooves of the record.

What more versitility does one want from a technology?

Excerpts from National Public Radio -

You Can Play the Record, but Don't Touch
by Nell Boyce - Morning Edition, July 16, 2007

At the Library of Congress, in a small, white room with bright red carpet, physicist Carl Haber sits down to play a record from 1930. It's a recording of Gilbert and Sullivan's "Iolanthe." But here's the strange thing: This record is broken.

"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.

But this turntable doesn't spin like a normal record player. And there's no needle hovering over the record. Instead, there's a camera linked to a computer. It snaps detailed images of the groove cut into the disc, and uses the images to reconstruct the sound without ever touching the record.

Haber got the idea for this setup a few years ago, when he was driving to work and listening to NPR. He heard a report on how historic audio recordings can be so fragile that they risk being damaged if someone plays them by dragging a needle over their surfaces. It made Haber wonder if he could get the sound off old recordings without touching their delicate surfaces. He worked with a colleague, Vitaliy Fadeyev, and they managed to reconstruct sound on a 1950 recording of "Goodnight, Irene" performed by the Weavers.

This was just a proof of principle. They have now developed their hands-off technique to the point that it's being tested at the Library of Congress to see whether it's good enough to someday scan the library's vast archive of sound recordings.

One thing they've learned: A broken record is no problem. Haber clicks a mouse and the camera takes pictures of the groove on "Iolanthe."

"And by taking these pictures, it essentially just unwinds the record into a big long stripe," Haber explains.

A scanned photo image of the grooves in the record from "Hemlock Blues" by David Lee Johnson from the early 1950s. IRENE skips right over the scratched parts (as seen above) of normally unplayable records. Image Credit: physicist Carl Haber

The picture appears on Haber's computer screen. It looks like a black and white photo of a tire tread.

"Here's the break," he says, pointing to a line. "You can see, there's a little piece of dust, little scratch marks on it." The computer ignores all these flaws as it translates the images into sound.
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IRENE was installed at the Library of Congress late last year. The library has millions of old audio recordings, and many are in poor condition or use obsolete formats. Peter Alyea, a digital conservation specialist at the library, says that to play old records, you often need trained technicians who can do things like choose the proper needle out of dozens of options. But if IRENE lives up to its potential, Alyea says, anyone could make a digital copy of an old record.
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Alyea says it's like a photocopy machine for sound. "It brings the possibility of automation much closer to reality for these kinds of materials."

And given that he has thousands and thousands of records that he would like to digitize and make widely available, the prospect of automation is hugely attractive.
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Exactly how good is IRENE at making digital copies?
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One test involves a disc etched with simple tones to see how well IRENE can read some old-fashioned discs coated with lacquer. The library has thousands of these one-of-a-kind records. The format is obsolete.

But luckily, Haber says, audio engineer George Horn still makes them at Fantasy Studios in California. Horn cut some discs with well-defined tones. Haber says, IRENE can reproduce the tones amazingly well.

"The machine is not adding its own color. It's not adding anything of its own nature," he says.

Haber says IRENE does take some things away. He plays one record from 1953, a Les Paul and Mary Ford recording of the song "Johnny Is the Boy for Me." This record has a bad skip in it that's very apparent on a regular record player. But IRENE skips over the skip like it's not there.
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IRENE, an audio-recording system, can scan old and damaged records and wax cylinders ... and make digital recordings from them. Image Credit: physicist Carl Haber

IRENE isn't perfect. It removes pops and clicks, but it sometimes has a hissing noise in the background. Still, the Library of Congress finds all this encouraging enough that it has started testing the system on hundreds of discs, what Alyea describes as a kind of simulation of what a mass digitization project would be like.

When taking flat photographs, it can create a three-dimensional image of the groove on a record, or on an old wax cylinder. Haber been working with the University of California's Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology, to reconstruct sound from field recordings, like one wax cylinder made around 1911 that features a Native American called Ishi.

Haber says it's amazing to hear these voices from the past. "There's this whole human and cultural component to what we're looking at," says Haber, whose main job is studying subatomic particles at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. "That makes it wonderful."
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Try doing this with laser technology!

Writing Checks Almost So … Last Century

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Writing Checks Almost So … Last Century!

When was the last time anyone drags a checkbook around with them every time they leave the house and run errands?

OK, if one doesn’t have American Express, one still needs a checkbook for an outing at COSTCO, but this is a rare exception.

Even retailers are moving to scanning checks they receive into an electronic communications package thus converting checks to electronic payments.

Plastic, plastic, plastic – it is just to convenient! And if one isn’t using their cerdit/debit card to pay for things, they are using the web to get things done.

Excerpts from AP via The Washington Times -

Check writing loses ground to electronic payments
By Josh Funk - ASSOCIATED PRESS - February 8, 2007

OMAHA, Neb. -- Some consumers may still be writing checks, but merchants increasingly are scanning those checks and converting them into electronic payments.

That, accompanied by the increasing use of credit and debit cards, may be tolling the end of check writing.

The Federal Reserve estimates that 49.5 billion checks were paid in the United States in 1995, compared with 36.6 billion in 2003.

The widespread availability of debit cards and the growing popularity of plastic are the biggest factors in the decline of check writing. From 2000 to 2003, the number of debit-card transactions nearly doubled, from 8.3 billion to 15.6 billion, and the number of credit-card transactions jumped from 15.6 billion to 19 billion.

Julie O'Neill of Omaha said she thinks her credit card is more convenient than writing a check, and all her spending is compiled on one statement at the end of the month.

When it comes time to pay bills, she turns to her computer instead of her checkbook because she can pay her bills at the last minute.

"I procrastinate, so then I can go online and not have to go through snail mail" to pay bills, she said.

Together, credit- and debit-card use accounted for 43 percent of all noncash payments in 2003, compared with 33 percent in 2000.
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The decline in check writing, combined with the increase in electronic check processing, prompted the Federal Reserve to dramatically reduce the size of its check-processing department, whose operations are covered by the processing fees it charges for handling checks and electronic transfers. Since 2003, the Fed has closed more than half of its 45 check-processing centers, and by the end of 2008, only 18 such centers will remain operational.

At some stores that process checks electronically, such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and clothing retailers Gap Inc. and Banana Republic, the clerk hands the check back to the consumer with his or her receipt after scanning it and claiming an electronic payment for the store.

Converting checks to electronic payments allows merchants to get paid quicker, and it may help reduce the number of insufficient-funds checks that businesses have to deal with. Processing checks electronically also is cheaper than processing paper checks.

In 2003, about 8.9 billion converted checks were reported, accounting for about 11 percent of all noncash payments.

Consumers may not realize that many of the checks they write to utilities, mortgage companies and other businesses also are being converted to electronic payments when those companies receive the checks, said Terri Bradford, a payments researcher with the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.

Some business payments might be better suited to checks than electronic payments, Ms. Bradford said. Writing a check instead of authorizing a wire transfer or making some other electronic payment may help a business better manage its cash flow because there is still some delay between when the check is written and when it is received.
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Ms. Bradford said there's no way to predict how quickly check writing will continue to be replaced by electronic payments.

Still, checks continue to be used because older consumers are comfortable with what they have used for years. And Ms. Bradford said there are still some transactions for which checks are better suited, such as paying the neighbor youth who mowed the lawn or making a contribution to the church, to have a record of charitable donations at tax time.
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Ms. Bradford said checks might remain popular for transactions in which the payment must be guaranteed, such as at real estate closings, especially when people and small businesses are involved.

And she doesn't expect checks to entirely vanish.

"There's a certain segment of the population that's going to write checks," she said. "You probably get stuck behind them in the check-out aisle."
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