Seeing announcements for Sony’s new PS-LX300USB USB turntable reminds me what a misunderstood area this is.

I sense that this post may work best in the form of a Q&A, so here goes.

Is digitising vinyl worth the effort?

In many cases, no. Try Amazon or eBay: chances are you can pick up a second-hand CD of the the same music for not much money, often with bonus tracks, or pick and choose from Amazon’s download store or iTunes.

Digitising vinyl is a great deal more work than ripping a CD, and the results may well be less satisfactory. When you rip a CD, it arrives on your hard drive already split into tracks with metadata like title, artist and track name already completed, presuming that the CD is in one of the internet databases like freedb, which it almost always is. That’s not the case with vinyl rips; you have to edit the tracks yourself. Further, CDs don’t usually suffer from crackles, dust, scratches or inner groove distortion, all of which afflict vinyl.

That said, there are a few reasons why you might want to do this:

1. A CD or legal download is not available
2. You are time-rich and money poor
3. You prefer the sound of the vinyl

Point 3 is the most interesting. Sometimes the vinyl was made from better tapes, or mastered better, or features a mix not available on CD. In these loudness war days, the vinyl even of a new release may be better than the CD. Example: Icky Thump by the White Stripes. It has audiophile-quality vinyl mastering, but the usual over-compressed sound on CD.

Finally, sometimes you just want to hear that old sound that you remember. Pure nostalgia, but what’s wrong with that?

Still, if you are digitising vinyl for the sound, then the sound is all important. How then do you get the best results? Read on.

Will a USB turntable make it easy to convert my old records to digital?

Up to a point. A USB turntable is just a turntable with an integrated pre-amplifier and USB connection. It solves a technical problem, by applying RIAA equalization to the output from the phono cartridge, and by including an analogue to digital converter. If you are already set up for playing vinyl, you can achieve the same thing by running a cable from the line-out of your hi-fi to the line-in on your PC or laptop soundcard.

USB turntables will not make your old records any less scratched or dirty. They won’t turn the record over for you at the end of the side. They won’t magically enter the metadata or split the tracks (software might split the tracks for you, but it might not get it exactly right).

So you can guess the answer to the next question:

I already have a turntable. Do I need a USB turntable to digitise my vinyl?

No. In fact, your existing turntable may well be better. You do need a phono pre-amp, but you might have one built into your hi-fi amplifier, or you can get these separately. If you are already able to play vinyl, then you must already have a phono pre-amp somewhere in your set-up.

How do I get the best sound when digitising vinyl?

Not easily. Vinyl is a frustrating medium, because it takes so much effort and expense to get the best out of it. Critical elements include the turntable itself, the arm, the cartridge and stylus, the setup (things like the tracking weight and bias), even the table the turntable sits on makes a difference (wall mounts are good). In other words, the starting point to getting the best sound is the quality of the turntable, and it’s unlikely that a cheap USB turntable bundle is going to deliver anything close to the best sound.

Next comes the phono pre-amp. Since cartridges have low output, the quality of the pre-amp is more critical than it is for CD, especially if you have a moving coil type. Again, it’s unlikely that the pre-amp in a USB turntable is up with the best.

Third, there is the analogue to digital converter, or ADC. Same story: critical component.

So if you truly want the best sound, you need an excellent turntable assembly, an excellent phono pre-amp, and an excellent ADC, preferably external to your computer. Not a USB turntable.

I don’t mean to dismiss the USB turntable idea completely. I’d expect fair results, and if you just want to recapture a memory or two, or hear the record granddad made of his trumpet playing, it will do the job nicely.

What is audio restoration and do I need it?

Once you’ve digitised the audio signal, you end up with a sound file that faithfully captures all the hiss and crackle of the original. What you want is just the music, without the hiss and crackle. Most audio processing software, including Audacity and Sony’s Sound Forge (which comes bundled with its USB turntables), have audio restoration filters that aim to do this.

Two big problems. One is that these filters cannot eliminate problems like hiss and crackle, but only reduce them. The second is that all these filters compromise the sound. The filters are smart, and aim to damage the music as little as possible, but some audible side-effects are pretty much inevitable.

Further, once you have your digital sound file you can try your hand at applying other effects to improve it. Normalization is a good one: it brings the volume up to an appropriate level, which is useful if you recorded the vinyl at too low a level. Then again, it is better to get the level right in the first place. By all means apply other effects as well, but bear in mind that it is very easy to make the music sound less good than it did before.

My tip: the best audio restoration filter is none. They often do more harm than good. They are most useful when the original is really poor.

If you really have time on your hands, manual restoration can be very effective. You can zoom in on an annoying scratch and carefully edit just that short section, avoiding damage to the entire piece. Snag: it’s skilled work and takes ages.

A few closing comments

It can be worth it. Some early pressings of classic albums sound astonishingly good on vinyl.

I’d also like to put in a good word for Sony’s Sound Forge Audio Studio. It’s modestly priced, easy to use, fast and feature-rich. Audio Studio is a cut-down version of a professional tool, Sound Forge 9, which is also highly regarded. The main omission in the budget edition is multi-channel support; not a problem if you are digitising vinyl.

If you are in Europe, online retailer Needles & Spins has some handy “digitise your vinyl” bundles.

PS: Apparently some CD metatag databases recognize “needledrops”, if you rip a CD that was sourced from vinyl. This is done by looking at the track lengths. It is still going to be less comprehensive and reliable than a CD rip.

Technorati tags: multimedia, digitising vinyl

Sun’s Tim Bray, XML luminary, marks 10 years since XML 1.0 became a W3C recommendation (10th Feb 1998) with a post on his blog: a history of the people behind XML which he explains was written ten years ago.

Microsoft played an important role in the popularity of XML. I believe the company saw it as a counterweight to Java. Java was about application portability; XML was about data portability and application communication. With XML, Microsoft could do .NET and still live in a Java world.

Back in 1997 there were fireworks at the W3C when Bray, who was co-editing the XML specification with C. Michael Sperberg-McQueen, joined Netscape as a consultant. Microsoft was worried, I guess because at the time Netscape was a big rival and Microsoft thought XML might be somehow twisted to give Netscape some advantage – a puzzling idea, in hindsight, but there it is. Anyway, Microsoft insisted that Bray be removed as co-editor; Bray protested and eventually a deal was struck which put Microsoft’s Jean Paoli alongside Bray and Sperberg-McQueen as XML co-editors.

Maybe this incident explains Bray’s hostility towards the company:

Some of the people in this story are companies. Ned is Netscape and Mick is Microsoft … Mick is a domineering, ruthless, greedy, egotistical, self-centered, paranoid bastard. Whether or not he’s actually a crook is, as they say, currently the subject of litigation; but he’s not good company or a good friend. The ruthlessness and greed would not be so irritating (we swim, after all, in late-capitalist waters) were they not accompanied, at all times, by Mick’s claim to speak not in his own interest, but selflessly on behalf of his millions of customers, whose needs only he understands. Thus, anyone who disagrees is conspiring against the interests of the world’s computer users.

Perhaps in his position I would feel the same way. But is Microsoft innately more evil than other companies? I’m not convinced, though note another of Bray’s comments:

This isn’t about technology any more, and certainly not people, it’s business. The Internet business, for all the visionary rhetoric, has to do with nothing but money and power and executive ego.

Again, a little too extreme for me, but only a little. Interesting to reflect on in the context of, say, the OOXML vs ODF debate.

The unofficial Windows Vista Forums have posted a download link for the final release Windows Vista Service Pack 1. No doubt there are many others. The post includes a health warning:

We must strongly note that using this file may violate the End User License Agreement from Microsoft.

but adds:

Given that some people are indeed having major technical problems and “bugs” with Windows Vista, we have made the decision to offer this download without malicious intent, strictly for the purposes of open technical support and community assistance for legitimate Windows Vista customers. We have not received authorization to distribute this file, but at the same time have received no request not to do so. This file will become unavailable should any request be made by Microsoft or any owner of this content to do so.

The downloads are digitally signed, so I should think they are the real thing but of course cannot guarantee it.

The real question: what was Microsoft thinking when it announced that the service pack was done, but said that users would not get it until mid-March?

In mid-March, we will release Windows Vista SP1 to Windows Update (in English, French, Spanish, German and Japanese) and to the download center on microsoft.com.

If for some reason Microsoft did not want its users to benefit from the service pack until mid-March, it had a simple solution: don’t announce it until then. Too late now.

Then again, why does Microsoft want to defer this release for over a month? It is putting users at risk, because they will resort to unofficial downloads like the one above, and that’s an opportunity for malware.

Microsoft: put SP1 up for download now and solve this utterly predictable problem.

Postscript

I should add that Microsoft did give a reason for postponing the SP1 release. It relates to what Microsoft describes as small number of device drivers which “do not follow our guidelines for driver installation”. Apparently this can result in non-working drivers, though users can fix the problem by reinstalling them. Mike Nash adds:

While we know that most customers who update from Windows Vista to SP1 will NOT be affected, our approach is to improve the experience for all our customers.  To do this, we will begin making SP1 available through Windows Update in mid-March, giving us time to work with some of our hardware partners to make adjustments to the installation process for the affected drivers.  As SP1 gets delivered through Windows Update, we will only offer it to PCs that we detect don’t have any of the affected device drivers installed.  We’re taking the next month or so to continue our work of identifying as many of these devices as possible.

The point here is that getting SP1 through Windows Update is not quite the same as downloading and running the large single file. If you go through Windows Update, you get a differential download and more intelligence about what is actually downloaded.

I still don’t get it. If there is a problem with the device driver installation, is SP1 really done? Further, what is to stop Microsoft offering the update for manual download with appropriate health warnings? Better than all these unofficial downloads, I would have thought.

I meant to link yesterday to John Lam’s post on living without the mouse.

I do so today because it fits nicely with Edward Tufte’s remark that (ideally) the content is the interface.

Lam’s point is that “toolbars just waste screen real estate”. Thus, he’s learned to operate as far as possible with keystrokes, not only because this is quicker (hand does not leave the keyboard), but also because it lets him remove on-screen furniture.

He writes primarily about Visual Studio, but also has a great tip for Office 2007 apps like Word and Excel. Press Ctrl-F1 to toggle the ribbon on or off. No ribbon means a lovely clean workspace.

Turn Me Up is a new initiative whose aim is to restore dynamics to recorded music. Currently many, perhaps most new and remastered CDs and downloads suffer from excessive compression, the result being a sound that is fatiguing and lacking in dynamic range. It is a problem that is well documented, but mastering engineers feel intense pressure to make CDs that are as loud as the competition, so the situation continues.

The organization explains that:

…it’s not our goal to discourage loud records; they are, of course, a valid choice for many artists. We simply want to make the choice for a more dynamic record an option for artists…Today, artists generally feel they have to master their records to be as loud as everybody else’s.

The idea of Turn Me Up is to promote the benefits of mastering with full dynamics and to communicate this to the purchaser with a logo. This also explains the “Turn Me Up” name. This is the proposed text:

Turn Me Up!™ Certified

To preserve the excitement, emotion and dynamics of the original performances this record is intentionally quieter than some. For full enjoyment simply Turn Me Up! (www.TurnMeUp.org).

Unfortunately the site does not reveal who has formed Turn Me Up or how much support it has within the industry, though according to this story it was founded by Florida-based Charles Dye, who has mixed CDs for Bon Jovi, Ricky Martin and Sammy Hagar. Apparently a new release from John Ralston, called Sorry Vampire, which is mixed by Dye, uses the Turn Me Up text on the CD.

I’m not sure what chance of success Turn Me Up has, but it strikes me as a sensible approach and worth supporting.

I am having a lot of fun with the Asus Eee PC. In its way, it is a game changer. I wondered if it would run Mono applications, enabling support for the open source version of Microsoft .NET. The news is partially good:

Unfortunately, I’ve not been able to do much more than that so far. I tried compiling a basic forms application, but got a pkg-config error. This may be because of a kernel module called binfmt, which let you register interpreters for different binary formats. This is normally present in Linux, but seems to be omitted from the Eee kernel. If I am right, then fixing this means figuring out how to recompile the kernel on the Eee. You can still execute Mono applications by running mono as in the screenshot, but the compiler seems to expect binfmt to work. I am sure someone will figure this out.

Update –  getting better – we have GUI:

Still can’t use -pkg though.

Update

The problem with -pkg is easy to fix. Just install pkg-config 🙂

I’m not clear yet whether the absence of binfmt could cause other problems.

Further update

Everything is working. I can compile and run the Hello World examples here. Note that the Gtk example there does not quit properly, so I suggest you use this modified version.

To get this working, I did as follows:

1. Added a xandros repository to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://xnv4.xandros.com/xs2.0/upkg-srv2 etch main contrib non-free

2. Installed mono-gmcs (.NET 2.0 compiler). (I think that is the minimum but I’m not 100% sure)

3. Installed pkg-config

4. Installed gtk-sharp2

I’ve also installed JEdit for editing. Not in the repository, so I installed using the jar installer on the Jedit site.

df shows 30% used, not too bad.

Technorati tags: mono, asus eee pc, c#