I have discovered (as I had presumed) that my old indie music cronies are enormously pleased with the idea of preserving the culture of their youth!

The main problem we have is we don’t have any suitable library to deposit it with. We are working on this. If any of you have contacts at state reference libraries, please get them in touch with us!

That said, there’s no reason to hold off on ripping and scanning. If you have an old flyer collection, then please scan the lot. (600dpi TIFF is ideal.) I have put up pages on digitising audio, image scanning and negative scanning, which I wrote off the top of my head and which desperately need knowledgeable input from others.

If this is catching your attention, do please join the mailing list.

Update: I’ve just posted to the Save Aussie Music blog. An attempt to entice bored suburbanites and leverage their nostalgia. I’ve certainly leveraged mine — just set up my cassette deck and ION turntable again yesterday afternoon.

With SkullCandy Ink’d headphones. Apparently these are “hep” with the “kids.” They just happen to be pretty good for ten quid (seven on Amazon). Left and right aren’t marked, as is apparently the fashion these days (telling left and right isn’t “fab” or “bling” or whatever the “emo” term is). But if you’re too cheap for Sennheisers or Etymotics, they’ll do very nicely, thank you.

‘Pod is filled with This Kind Of Punishment, ’80s New Zealand indie on Xpressway. 1, 2, 3. Never say I never give you anything.

Redcountess blessed me with What Would Keith Richards Do? (“Everything.”)

Oh, and my mother gave me Christian Rock. I don’t dare play this thing in case it causes a vortex of suck consuming all in its wake.

So. How was your haul?

(Mind you, I still so so so want one of these.)

Bonus: The earliest known sound recording — 1860, seventeen years before Edison.

(Bonus link: a magnetic thing that actually does something useful.)

(My current yak shaving is reripping all my CDs as FLAC. Disk is so cheap.)

A caution to people buying these: if you do not follow the “directional markings” on the cables, your music will play backwards. Please check that before mentioning it in your reviews.

I was disappointed. I consider myself an audiophile – I regularly spend over $1000 on cables to get the ultimate sound. I keep my music-listening room in a Faraday cage to prevent any interference that could alter my music-listening experience. Sending any signal down ordinary copper can degrade the signal considerably. While ordinary listeners might not notice, to somebody with even a rudimentary knowledge of sound, the artifacts are glaring. Denon should have used silver wiring (hermetically sealed inside the rubber sheath to prevent any tarnishing, of course), which has a significantly higher conductivity than copper. Furthermore, Denon needs to treat the wires they use in the cable with a polarity inductor to ensure minimal phase variance.

Needless to say, I returned the cable and wrote an angry letter to the so-called engineers at Denon.

— from Amazon customer reviews of the finest cable in existence.

Update: Worse.

Also: an interview with SunnComm, who did the copy protection on the Charley Pride CD.

Highlights:

• Copy protectors to provide (copy protected) Windows Media Architecture files of songs on the CD you buy.

• Plans to use the DMCA in the hope of making it illegal to talk too much about copy protection schemes. No, really.
• How the copy-protected Charley Pride CD was cracked.
• They actually think they can do this without terminally pissing off their customers. “If Hollywood had invented the toilet, it would be five times as expensive and you’d pay $1 every time you flush.”

Check the CNet media section on a regular basis too.

This is a problem for all consumers – as the UK Campaign for Digital Rights points out, “These new CDs will play fine to start with, but underneath, the sounds have been subtly corrupted. Your CD player has to work much harder to play the music correctly, so after a few scratches, you’ll have tracks going wrong MUCH SOONER than with normal CDs. In truth, these CDs are not as good quality as normal CDs.”

The Campaign recommends a policy of taking back non-playing CDs as defective immediately (pointing to the ‘CD Digital Audio’ logo, which does constitute a claim that the disc meets the logo’s standards), or taking it back if it fails after a short time.

From Need To Know (http://www.ntk.net/), Friday 21st August 2001:

MICHAEL JACKSON’s new single seems likely to “Rock Your World” in more ways than one, as promotional copies sent out by Sony appear to be the first examples spotted “in the wild” of audio CDs which won’t play in PC CD-ROM drives. “When loaded into the CD drive, the disc spun continuously as though the drive was trying to access the TOC of a blank or corrupted CDR”, reports our correspondent, a producer and sound engineer, adding: “None of our stand-alone professional or domestic CD players had a problem with it”. Of course, this is exactly what Macrovision’s SafeAudio (or similar copy-protection systems) are intended to do: insert “bad” error-correction codes, which audio CD players can interpolate around, but higher-precision CD-ROM drives don’t, effectively preventing you from ripping (or listening to) any tracks on your PC. The UK’s Campaign for Digital Rights (formerly the “Free Dmitry Sklyarov” guys) are still planning a leafleting campaign alerting shoppers to this ingenious reduction of their music’s self-healing properties (making CDs more susceptible to scratches or other damage) – though perhaps an “explicit lyrics”-style labelling system wouldn’t go amiss either, for those of us who just don’t own a non-CD-ROM CD player.

The copy protection is expected to last until CD-ROM manufacturers – or third-party programmers – can produce firmware which can cope with the protected CDs. This should be much easier with examples to hand. Third-party programmers are quite adept at this sort of thing – witness the regular appearance of region-free DVD chips for players that are not region-free from the manufacturer.

The UK Campaign for Digital Rights has a page of useful links for the pissed-off consumer.

Need To Know is alarmingly clue-enhanced. I recommend you subscribe immediately.

Ever played your ENTIRE CD COLLECTION on shuffle? You Will(tm). Shits on radio, fer sure.

We (well, Lionel Lauer, the housemate) use a PC running the e-smith server, a Linux-based system for sharing an Internet connection around a house or small business. (You can download it free or buy a CD with support.)

As well as its intended use (sharing our Internet connection around the house), there is an add-on module for turning the server into a streaming MP3 jukebox.

Get any crappy old PC (Pentium 90 or better), a cheap network hub and a huge cheap hard disk, follow the instructions, string blue cable all around the house and have YOUR ENTIRE COLLECTION AT
YOUR FINGERTIPS.

(Note that the MP3 server doesn’t include ripping software, to convert the CDs into MP3s – you have to get that yourself. Note also, I don’t think the jukebox server does Ogg Vorbis or other non-patent-encumbered formats, though I’m sure that will come with time.)

I don’t know how I coped for so long playing the little silver things separately. It just seems ridiculously primitive.

The next stage, of course, will be setting up the turntable and ripping the vinyl too. All of it …

Well, read about the ELP Laser Turntable and weep.

(No, that’s not Emerson, Lake and Palmer …)

The company site.

Press release on the thing.

Press release on the history of the laser turntable.

The Laser Turntable FAQ. (It only plays black records?)

Some newsgroup discussion, from rec.audio.high-end.