December 2024

If you haven't read it already, we've announced the retirement of most of our services starting in 2025. This blog update will be our second to last ever, with January's post being the last one. We've managed to scratch out 20 years of service, and need to minimize our offerings and reduce our running costs considerably. Not all services are going away for good, read the full announcement for details.

• PhillyVoice renews interest in vinyl collecting by covering last month's VinylCon here in Philadelphia. Any of my readers go? I already have too much vinyl!
• It's not April, right? The Verge lifts the punchline: Alien: Romulus will get a limited-edition VHS release
• rfinnie can help you with his Blockbuster Video VHS insert template for color laser printers to help catalog your new copy of Alien: Romulus!
• Vox shows you what really goes missing when you compress a song; Listen to what gets lost when an MP3 is made!
• The NVIDIA Blog brags about their Artificial Intelligence that can make any sound you can describe: Fugatto, World’s Most Flexible Sound Machine, Debuts
• Ben Wang details his hacker build of a 192-channel Phased Array Microphone - this thing can tell where you are in the room with it's target array of microphones!
• Pikuma covers a subject near and dear to my heart: The Impact of Jungle Music in 90s Video Game Development
• I-D Magazine ambushes the pirates by asking Is It Okay to Illegally Stream Movies? (especially ones that aren't available anywhere to begin with!)
• Developer Matthew Bird releases his Open source separation of music into constituent instruments Audio Decomposition in his effort to turn songs into sheet music!
• The Verge writer Andrew Marino answers the question: Why we can’t make cassette and CD players like we used to? Short answer: Sony abandoned the marketplace!
• Don't copy that floppy old college emblem! Penn State Wins Trademark Trial Against Online Retailer Vintage Brand
• Digital Preservation at the National Library of Norway shows the comprehensive process of Rearchiving 2 million hours of digital radio. Step 1: Buy a lot of hard drives.
• Speaking of preserving, SecNigma has a Starter’s guide on recovering damaged and rotten Compact Discs (It's true, they do fail!)
• I've never done this (I have other tricks), but Reddit's oddlysatisfying shows Fixing a scratched record with a digital microscope and a sewing needle.

November 2024

• Headphonesty twists the knife: Vinyl Sales Plummet by 33% in 2024 After A Decade of Rapid Growth
• The New York Times [paywall] laments As Cassettes Come Back, the Dilemma Is Finding a Tape Deck. No biggie! We can help you with that!. Can't jump the paywall? Archive.Today can help you, and thanks to the shills who brought this to my attention.
• On that note - I've seen Blank Tapes being sold at Fast Retailers, and can assure you, the magnetic tape they use is very poor sounding overall. You're better off buying new-old-stock cassettes off eBay vs. some recently unearthed Chinese garbage that will probably leave crud all over your tape deck heads!
• Need an audio clip of a particular bird chirp? I'm willing to bet Free Sound has it. Another dumping ground of short samples available for free use! A podcasters best friend when it comes to adding life to boring spoken word recordings.
• Are you making the switch from one DAW to another? SatyrDiamond has posted his good work on GitHub: DawVert - The DAW ConVERTer which will convert files from one format to another for (hopefully) seamless transitioning from one app to another!
• Longstanding publisher DJ Mag asks all Disk Jockeys: Are rotary mixers actually better? I prefer faders, but some insist on the cleanliness of old school rotaries...
• ScienceAlert leaves me dumbfounded with the discovery that Physicists Generated Sound Waves That Travel in One Direction Only! I cannot imagine the use for it, but the technology sounds fascinating!
• I think this is a report of previous stories on another platform, but TechSpot repeats that the 5" Optical disc may not go quietly into the night: New optical storage breakthrough could make CDs relevant again
• Our boys across the pond at the BBC report that a Four-day week 'an overwhelming success' in Iceland! Bjork must be thrilled!

October 2024

We'll keep it short and Halloween free this month. Our inset photo to the right shows what happens when you let a young new hire and a price gun mix...unsellable records! Got a quick second? Jump over and take Benjojo's Optical Media Survey, especially if you still use Optical Media (CD's and DVD's and Blu-Rays'). Otherwise, this month seems to be only Birth and Funeral announcements...

• OK, I'll admit, this has nothing to do with this blog, but you'd be amiss if you didn't quickly check out artist Koen van Gilst web demo Time Flies (literally...)
• Found on Reddit: This Is Satisfying: Making a vinyl record. In this case, an embedded one minute video of a green vinyl record with black specs being pressed - from the initial donut being formed to final trimmed 12" vinyl!
• Author Daniel Parris gets to Unpacking Vinyl's Remarkable Revival: A Statistical Analysis, with a lot of charts and good explanation of past trends.
• On the more nerdy spectrum follow along on (the very long) Old Vintage Computing Research: Programming the Convergent WorkSlate's spreadsheet Microcassette future - a 1970's era electronic spreadsheet portable laptop device with a built-in Microcassette (!) used for backing up data pre-floppies.
• The Guardian's Laura Snapes over the pond says Farewell to the car CD player, source of weirdly deep musical fandoms. Now that good radio is only available as a subscription, I'd disagree - but that's more about my age and generation.
• Speaking of over the pond, their public channel, the BBC has released it's BBC Sound Effects Library where you can find old Dr. Who special effect sounds via it's easy to use Search, I'm sure. It's a video editors dream for filling in backgrounds with natural (free) sound effect! (Keep reading - there's more!)
• In a shocking search result, this is a Government Website: Citizen DJ where anyone can make music using the free-to-use audio and video materials from the Library of Congress! Brought to us by a Brian Foo as part of the 2020 Innovator in Residence Program.
• Tom's Hardware translates the press release about Chinese researchers tout optical disk format with up to 125 TB capacity. That's nearly 10,000x what Blu-Ray can hold currently. Might be required for 4k and 8k television series releases for future televisions!
• Ars Technica knows full well about the Music industry’s 1990s hard drives, like all HDDs, are dying Public Service Announcement: Backup Your Hard Drive Right Now!
• Mixonline jumps on that bandwagon with this expose Inside Iron Mountain: It’s Time to Talk About Hard Drives, wherein storage giant Iron Mountain found 20% of all stored hard drive media unreadable. Public Service Announcement: Why aren't you Backup Your Hard Drive Right Now? Seriously!
• So hard drive are fallible. Thankfully, blogger SecNigma takes on a Starter’s guide on recovering damaged and rotten CDs, although keeping Optical Media stored dry and flat will give them pretty long life nonetheless.

September 2024

Apologies for missing last months update, we've got so many stories this month! As this company approaches 20 years in business next year, we're considering using this successful achievement as an opportunity to possibly retire and consolidate services and domains, especially with the massive decline in annual revenue, and general lack of orders for some of more esoteric media formats. We'll post more as we get closer to 2025 - for now enjoy this New Yorker cartoon that really irks me about Vinyl...

• You've seen the Gold Record plaques they award to artists once they achieve thousands of sales figures? However, the Beastie Boys dismantled their ‘Paul’s Boutique’ gold record plaque to find it didn’t contain their own music. Cutting corners in the gold-plated department?
• In the spirit of mass-produced vinyl records, it wasn't always this way. History Today goes On the Record: Music Before Mass Production where author Eva Rodríguez delves into mass-producing albums when you could only record it live.
• From the BBC: Record labels forgot these songs existed. One man rescued them, a profile of Rob Johnson who hounds labels to release back catalog singles onto streaming services.
• Artist Michael Gale walks you through the process of releasing an album on floppy disk. From mastering multiple tracks into a seemless album, to compressing the resulting audio to fit on a floppy, this more-technical-than-artistic endeavor includes code and audio examples!
• Ever want to dabble with the digital DJ setups but insist on running Linux? You should know about xwax: Digital vinyl on Linux which integrates with any Timecoded Vinyl setups that are common today.
• As if you could find a cassette to play on them anymore, the nostalgia train has come full circle with Fiio’s reboot of the Walkman which no longer hides those glorious cassettes in it's clear case. Is 8-Track next?
• Makes you want to dig out your old Minidisc player: "Minidisc" (1998) is an album by Gescom (who are really Autechre with no disguise) released only on Minidisc, containing 88 tracks* which are designed to be played on shuffle, because Minidisc, unlike CD or any other physical format, can be shuffled with no audible gap between tracks. Each track is designed to segue into any other so the album is different every time you play it.. What an interesting application of shuffle to deliver a unique audio experience!
• Kevin Boone waxes nostalgia for the 3.5mm headphone jack socket. Rightfully so! I prefer wires so that everything stays attached to each other!
• Ernie over at Tedium asks the ever important question: Compact Discs With Hidden Pregap Tracks: How Did They Do It?
• In a 'Didn't Know I Needed It Until I Did' I was delighted to use MP4 to WAV to quickly Convert an MP4 video file into WAV audio file so I could extract an audio snippet out of a posted video with great success.
• You can hear the Death Rattle of 5" Optical Media! End of an era: Apple's SuperDrive has finally sold out after 16 years at the same time that Sony is killing off recordable Blu-ray, bidding farewell to disc burning.
• Ars Technica wonders why DVDs are dying right as streaming has made them appealing again
• PCWorld suggests 5" media is not over because Facebook uses 10,000 Blu-ray discs to store 'cold' data. Facebook should call Sony about their blow-out sale on media...
• Sky News offers hope that U.K. Employers will have to offer four-day week under new plans
• AP News reports that Japan wants its hardworking citizens to try a 4-day workweek while Greece becomes first EU country to introduce a six-day working week. Which country is going to regret this decision?

June/July 2024

We're doomed as a species, as the screen-cap embedded to the right suggests that the loss of basic data archiving skills happens in a single generation!

• Recently acquire your own suitcase turntable and looking to elict the best performance from it? We stumbled across Grooved by OKatBest which helps you calibrate your turntable with this free web app by sampling the playback and suggesting how out of sync it is.
• YouTuber Half As Interesting lets us in on the secret of Why Tape Storage is Making a Sneaky Comeback? [06'22 runtime]
• Bad News for FM Radio! Seems the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation to pull plug on FM radio in lieu of more modern DAB+ equipment.
• BBC (which is probably still run on Floppies) reports on the people who won't give up floppy disks. I understand there is some legacy hardware still running automated loops saved on floppies!
• In the Yet Another Audio Codec history, Mark Z's team announced their own brand offering: MLow: Meta's low bitrate audio codec, which is promising for the future of saturated bandwidth.
• MarketWatch ominously predicts the four-day workweek is closer than you think. I say embrace it with vigor! Take your justified extra day!
• Stumbled across this map of 4 Day Week Companies and it's a nice visualization of the spread in popularity for the 4-day Work Week across the globe.

May 2024

We'll lead this month's Analog to Digital Blog with a audio snippet from a recent Vinyl to CD Conversion of the album The Age of Television - A chronicle of the first 25 years. In this audio clip from a Television broadcast, the host cajoles a young girl to wave to her family on TV, only with a profoundly adept (and surprisingly true) retort about the value of TV content! Click the album cover to the right to listen to this 30 second clip!

• The Conversation sets the tone of the future of vinyl records with the story of The triumph of vinyl: Vintage is back as LP sales continue to skyrocket
• The Elysian has a great read by author Elle Griffin, No one buys books, in which she cites this quote, a sure sign of the demise of the 'music industry':

  "We all know about Netflix, we all know about Spotify and other media categories, and we also know what it has done to some industries… The music industry has lost, in the digital transformation, approximately 50 percent of its overall revenue pool."
  — Markus Dohle, CEO, Penguin Publishing House

• Headphonesty details how much your kids will want your vintage stereo gear with this tale of woe: An Audiophile's $1M Dream Stereo System Gets Sold for Just $156K After His Death
• Half As Interesting tells us How Storing Movies on Vinyl Lost RCA $650 Million? [09'05 runtime]
• Suzanne Hogan at KCUR reports on the Proudly analog, a Missouri family business keeps cassette tapes alive for new generations
• ...and the Pittsburgh Citypaper shows that The cassette-tape comeback has reached Pittsburgh's record stores
• Forbes interviews The Queen of Sample Clearance: An Interview With Deborah Mannis-Gardner
• Joining the ranks of MP3 and OGG, follow along as the author details TSAC: Very Low Bitrate Audio Compression
• Have a podcast and need some custom sound effects? Check out the web app jsfxr - 8 bit sound maker and online sfx generator for bloopy-bleepy fun!
• From us north, the Canadian Conservation Institute delivers the good news with a detailed report on the Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs and Blu-rays. In short; optical media that is well written on the proper substrates will get you 25+ years of continued reliable service!
• Speaking of video on flat discs, Bradford Morgan White gives us the almost-forgotten history of The LaserDisc on Abort Retry Fail.
• MusicRadar also goes down memory lane with it's history lesson of the Synth wars: The story of (the birth of) MIDI
• Guardio Report has a consumer alert for you, showing that our beloved USPS is ranked first for Phishing and impersonations online - don't trust SMS or links saying their from the post office!
• And finally, in a bit of nostalgia, Reddit user Extension_Disk_3061 shows the photo progress of building a VHS store in my basement

April (Not Fools) 2024

We're scheduling a Record Store Day Sale from April 23-26th this month - Check any of our audio conversion sites to see our special sale on vinyl-only conversions this month! In the meanwhile, this astoundingly priced $550 Acoustic Revive RD-3 Disc Demagnetizer is an actual product with about as much use as the DVD Rewinder we featured last month; If you think the tiny mirror layer of aluminum (not magnetic!) is gonna be affected by any magnetic-ness to affect the hard-coded pits and valleys engraved into the plastic, it must be April Fools! Unlinked on purpose, because I think they're serious...ly stupid.

• Vulture starts us off this month with pop star calling out other pop stars: Billie Eilish Criticizes Pop Stars’ ‘Wasteful’ Vinyl Scheme, in which she complains that overzealous fans feel obligated to buy the star's vinyl releases in every vinyl color combination to 'collect the whole set', even though the content is exactly the same on every one. Oh boy, don't get me started....
• ...but it seems Andy Matuschak over at Square Signal wants to sell you the Surprising Advantage of Vinyl, in which he discovers an actual shortcoming (lack of headroom). We've explained in great detail back in 2012 why vinyl records are terrible, yet we have a whole new generation coming to the same conclusions...
• James' Coffee Blog comes up with a good use for A.I. and that old vinyl: Cataloguing my vinyl collection with computer vision, which seems a good use of A.I. to finally sort your record collection in the proper order.
• Nature makes the introduction to the neuroscientist formerly known as Prince’s audio engineer, Dr. Susan Rogers, still working to this day.
• Martijn Braam goes through the painstaking development of his FOSS Digital audio mixer that is a 4-in 4-out audio mixer that is controlled over USB that was made and used at a large conference to capture multiple rooms audio and video content for redistribution over the internet.
• If you're reading this, which home media do you cherish that is most liable to loss? Hollywood Confronts Decaying Digital Movie and TV Archives, and you should too! (We might be able to convert and save that home media for you!)
• TorrentFreak carries the torch of Publishers Secure Widespread Support in Landmark Copyright Battle With Internet Archive, which is akin to telling Libraries to stop collecting books, if you ask me. We'll see how this one pans out!
• Possibly unrelated, but the IEEE Spectrum offers A Brief History of Inkjet Printers, an object we often ignore but still use daily in our business - from imprinting our CD media, to trendy and cool Philadelphia Jawn T-Shirts.
• In a one-two punch, someone has been drinking the shorter work week Kool-Aid in Washington D.C.: First, Senator Bernie Sanders Introduces Legislation to Enact a 32-Hour Workweek with No Loss in Pay which was presented to Congress by Rep. Mark Takano. Feel free to read & review the Thirty-Two Hour Workweek Act as it's been submitted. I expect this will be ignored by the Republican-led Senate and mothballed into obscurity shortly, unfortunately.

March 2024

Orders continue to dribble in at a snails pace, and we only have a handful of stories this month to update you with on our March 2024 Analog to Digital blog. We're planning a Record Store Day Sale for April, but until then, maybe we should get into the lucrative business of selling DVD Rewinders; this clearly 'prank' plastic product simply spins the DVD counterclockwise!

• Speaking of home stereos, it turns out that Half of Vinyl Buyers in the US Don't Have a Record Player according to Luminate's recent study. In this study, they mention these responders are considered 'super-fans' who probably buy everything released by an artist, whether they can use it or not. Sounds like an addiction, not a hobby!
• The Verge reporter Alexis Ong sings about Flop rock: inside the underground floppy disk music scene. While 3.5" Floppy disks are facing extinction, but musicians are still pumping out DIY music projects on them!
• Reporter Emma Roth discusses how Streaming fatigue is making DVDs look like the better option, and that owning physical media might be a smarter investment than another streaming service! From The Verge
• Speaking of owning media, the IEEE Spectrum details the next generation of 5" optical media: DVD’s New Cousin Can Store More Than a Petabit (That's 1.6 million gigabits, or 4,000 times the size of a Blu-Ray disc!) You could get every episode of the longest running TV shows in 4k resolution, and still have room left over!
• CNBC returns to a 2022 UK pilot trial by 61 companies who adopted a four-day working week. Most firms in the trial have stuck to it! Over half of the firms have moved to the schedule permanently, while 89% still participate!

February 2024

A bit of frank news this month; we've noted a steady drop in annual sales for our Audio Conversion Services in the last few years (see our chart for a rough idea of the demise). Formed in 2005, we've managed to survive two office relocations and one worldwide pandemic in the last 19 years, but it seems we'll die of attrition; Our last week-long sale netted zero orders, even after we announced it to a thousand loyal customers. Have we saturated the Philadelphia audio conversion market completely? (More likely the fear of an upcoming recession has tightened budgets everywhere...) We'll need to see a significant turnaround to keep the Audio Conversion Services operating for another year on fumes. Under Design, our parent company, will continue to operate, but the Audio Conversion Services divisions may be shuttered permanently. Fair warning!

• Wired asks the real vinyl junkie collectors question: What’s the Value of 3 Million LPs in a Digital World? as they profile trying to find The ARChive of Contemporary Music a new home.
• Billboard uncovers the 'real' Swiftie revolution: One of Every 15 Vinyl Albums Sold in the U.S. in 2023 Was by Taylor Swift (That's only 3.5 million vinyl LPs, which is a tiny percentage of all sales.)
• ...and with that lede, the BBC follows with this obvious report: Female artists dominated 2023 music charts - but new acts are being squeezed out. Surprise: Miley Cyrus had the UK's biggest song of the year.
• In the old-is-new section, Audacy reports that Fleetwood Mac's 1977 album 'Rumours' is one of 2022’s top sellers!
• Rubenerd asks Is it worth collecting cassettes in 2024? I think you're better off converting them to CD, but that's just me.
• Axios notes a tiny jump in sales, and reports that CDs are making a comeback thanks to Gen Z
• Want to do some audio editing but only have a web browser? EditAudio.app might work in a pinch!
• J.B. Crawford over at Computers Are Bad delves deep into his exhaustive breakdown of multi-channel audio part 2 and how to put 5-7 audio signals into a single stream for surround sound. This is a bit technical, but his writing style is clean.
• NotebookCheck.net shows why we're still in business Digital master tapes of the 3D series 'Reboot' found, but a playback device is lacking - that's right, they cant find a 1990's era Bosch BTS-D1 playback deck!
• Ars Technica pulls back the curtain on the second horsemen from the Apocalypse, as Apple declares last MacBook Pro with an optical drive obsolete. This might be the end of CD and DVD as media formats! Of course, this laptop hadn't been for sale in more than seven years.
• Jacob Filipp rolls up his hacker skills and shows us the ArVid: how Russians squeezed 4 hard drives into one VHS tape in the 90s
• The Guardian reveals all the copycats to our idea: String of British firms switch over to four-day working week

January 2024

Happy New Year! We've been noticing issues with shipments using USPS Tracking numbers (and specifically our beloved Label 400, pictured to the right) when we discovered this USPS News Link Service update from early last year reporting this discontinuation of those tracking stickers. This has forced us to remove our Simple Shipper line of products immediately. Our Simple Shipper was a pre-paid cardboard return mailer for you to return your Vinyl Records to us. We relied on USPS Media Mail rate, in combination with basic stamps and USPS Label 400 Tracking stickers to reliably track shipments to and from our customers for everyone's sanity. We mourn the loss of this highly used feature, and apologize to our customers for not noticing the retirement earlier. As a replacement, we sell a single corrugated cardboard Vinyl Box shipped to you directly to let you ship your records securely back to our offices for audio conversion, but it has neither tracking nor return postage on it - it's an empty box, just album-sized.

• Billboard (the industry's oldest rag) offers this glimmer of second death: Vinyl Album Sales Rise for 17th Straight Year — But Growth Is Slowing
• Remember Personics: The cassette-based iTunes Store of the 1980s? Considering the copyright hoops you'd need to jump through to produce compilations like this today, it seems ahead of it's time for on-demand songs! [16'50 runtime]
• Ernie over at Tedium walks us through the first post-mortem of magnetic media first famous death: Why 3M Stopped Making Floppy Disks In The ’90s (Need them converted/bought or sold? FloppyDisk.com is the answer!)
• What would really seal the Work From Home sentiment with companies today? Perhaps this flashback to yesteryear and the The Pneumatic Tube Mail System in New York City brought to you by Untapped New York - decades ahead of quick delivery services of today! Imagine getting a hoagie delivered to your apartment directly!

December 2023

• Wikipedia gives you the full 411 on the competing round vinyl records like the Edison Diamond Disc Record which were wholly incompatible with popular lateral-groove disc record players (e.g. the Victor Victrola) which would damage them while extracting hardly any sound. That's one way to lock in your music audience!
• The New Yorker (paywall?) reporter Jon Michaud recalls the cassette tape's immediacy and power of sharing with The Cassette-Tape Revolution
• Eric Limer whips out some very old analog technology and pines The Tascam Portastudio 414 Let Me Fall In Love With Music Again
• Atlas Obscura reports on the archives of reporter Larry Katz: Unearthing the Gems in a Massive Archive of Rock Star Interviews. Hundreds of 'raw unfiltered' interviews with rock legends as they toured through the Boston area are now undergoing digitization.
• The Hollywood Reporter predicts (rightly) Why the Dying DVD Business Could Be Headed for a Resurrection Like CDs - with traditional 'analog media' disappearing from retail and rent, this attempts to own it forever?
• Robin Sharrock at Sharoma delves deep into Hacking a Sony MZ-N510/20 or MZ-R700 Minidisc units for improved features.
• Asianometry waxes approvingly about the superiority of The Rise and Reign of Japanese VCRs [31'08 runtime]

November 2023

• San Francisco's KQED takes on a trip of How a Photocopied Zine (The Bomb) Helped Turntablism Go Global, focusing on DJ's Z-Trip & Peanut Butter Wolf
• The Verge covers the demise of Discogs’ vibrant vinyl community being ruined by enshittification by fees.
• TechRadar copies the press release and boasts Technics' next-gen SL-1200 turntables are here and they’re as impressive as you'd expect
• Too old school for you? Get this transparent turntable, sure to match any interior decor!
• I've never considered that I could love a pocket-sized turntable more than when I met the The 1924 Mikiphone
• Forget Vinyl resurgence, how about Cassette Tapes? Maxell wants you to know they still make blank ones!
• The Guardian follows a shopkeeper in Pakistan who has collected more than 1,000 rare music tapes in a bid to thwart the Taliban’s cultural vandalism.
• DJMag.com asks What is the future of the DAW? (Digital Audio Workstations)
• Every want to separate a song into it's parts? Use the free-music-demixer, an AI-based music demixer running for free in your browser! It'll split vocals, drums, guitar, etc. into separate parts!
• Put an end cap on your DVD and Blu Ray 5" Optical Media Collections, as Fox News delivers the bad news: Best Buy to cease selling DVD and Blu-ray media after the holidays (Other vendors will probably follow suit, and online only might be the future!)
• Brain Baking steps up to offer Overlooked Reasons To Still Buy Physical Media, especially now when 'new' releases will not be 'new' anymore.
• Have some free 'me' time (or a long drive ahead of you?), and want to hear some classic audio books? Browse The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection and be lulled to sleep by the robot speaker.
• Uncle Bernie is always right: Sanders Champions '32-Hour Work Week With No Loss in Pay'

September 2023

• We haven't covered any vinyl turntable releases lately, so let's fix that with the House of Marley releasing its revamped Stir it Up Turntable made of bamboo and featuring bluetooth for a low $400. Rasta-inspired felt hemp turntable mats are not included.
• From the Blog of Splice - A History of the Amen Break: From The Winstons to Futurama and Om Unit, a recounting of the many, many reuses of a single drum loop.
• Ever need to do some quick audio editting, but don't want to download an app? Stumbled across Wavacity, a browser based open source port of Audacity, the world famous Audio Editting App. You can also Download and Build from the source on GitHub if you got the skillz.
• Matt Sephton over at Get Info welcomes our new AI overloards, and walks you through Automatically classifying the content of sound files using Machine Learning
• Fortune Magazine (they're still around?) reveals the dirty secret that Music labels sue nonprofit Internet Archive for copyright infringement. They're complaining about converted Acetate 78 RPM discs, which we all know are a huge source of revenue for these corporate executives.... Not!
• In the local news department, Above the Law follows the Push To Strip Fox’s Broadcast License Over Election Lies, which affects my local Philadelphia area Fox vomitorium.
• CBS News suggests that not only adults benefit from a shorter week, and ask What a 4-day school week means for teachers, students and families in Philadelphia. It seems a growing number of larger districts are moving to a 4-day school week!

July/August 2023

July was a busy month, with our annual national birthday celebration and all... So we combined the single story from July into our August report. Pictured to the right, an end table for a man cave made from recycled VHS tapes! You're welcome for the recycling idea!

• The Vinyl Factory reveals the odd Bauhaus style two tonearm turntable from Reed. I suppose so you can play track 3 first? DJ with the same record? Make any track an endless mix?
• Found this photo archive of Syrian Cassette Archives, which have jacket and cassette tape scans of mix tapes and album releases from yesteryear (and from Syria).
• SlashGear offers the frank truth of The Reason Cassette Tapes Are Making A Big Comeback
• Open Culture dips it's toes into the archives and reminds us of this ludicrous claim from record labels: Home Taping Is Killing Music: When the Music Industry Waged War on the Cassette Tape During the 1980s, and Punk Bands Fought Back!
• The Ringer delves into the murky 'copyright vs. publishing' confusion with Speak Now, Play Again: Taylor Swift and the Rerecording Revolution
• Did you know the Internet Archive has the USC Optical Sound Effects Library available for Free Download, Borrow and Streaming? The Wilhelm Scream beckons!
• Speaking of Wilhelm, watch YouTuber Soundly gets behinds the scenes of How the World's Most Famous Scream Was Recovered [03'01 runtime] Watch on YouTube [Embedded below]
• Cinema Sojourns has their own tribute to Portable Grindhouse: The Lost Art of the VHS Box.
• 7NEWS from down under has some disturbing news of the sudden death of home media: Disney to stop releasing DVDs and Blu-ray discs in major change for Australian customers
• Business Insider speaks the obvious truth: 4-Day Workweek Made Workers Happier and More Efficient
• ...and Yahoo News takes it further: Workers at companies that tested out a 4-day workweek are happier and more efficient — and firms made more money. One lawmaker says it's 'here to stay.'

June 2023

• Who needs satellite radio in your car when I can just keep a stack of my favorite 45's! My favorite blog Hackaday delves deep into Retro Gadgets: I Swear Officer, I Was Listening To A 45! (Pictured to the right - Muhammad Ali flipping wax in his car!)
• The Guardian follows up on the missing John Coltrane recordings lost in New York Public Library will finally be heard!
• YouTuber Half as Interesting offers Why Tape Storage is Making a Sneaky Comeback [6'21 runtime] Watch on YouTube [Embedded below]
• Components defends vinyl with the claim: "You can touch your music"
• The Verge delivers the first sign of the apocalypse when it comes to advertising based televisions: This FREE TV comes with two screens (one is devoted to ads)
• Electric Literature sounds the alarm and shouts that LaserDiscs Are Dying —And Here’s Why That Matters

May 2023

I'll leave you with this brain fart before we dive into it: Cassette Tapes had a Side A and Side B, therefore it was logical that its successor would be the CD!

• In the Gotta Have It But Don't Know Why excuse of surging vinyl sales, Half of Vinyl Buyers in the USA Don't Have a Record Player! That's odd, right? Anyone want to introduce them to us?
• In the Satisfying As %#$@ department, check out this retro cassette tape deck with automatic side flipping as an embedded video on Reddit
• YouTuber Phil Edwards delves deep into Why VHS won in the videotape format wars [12'15 runtime] Available on YouTube [Embedded below]
• Ted Gioia takes us on The Decline and Fall of the Hit Instrumental Song, a fascinating deep dive into 'musicians' vs. 'singers' debate today.
• The Freesound Blog puts on the headphones about Preserving the Sunset Editorial Sound Effects Library from the USC Archive including a recovered version of the original Wilhelm Scream!
• The AudioNotch Blog answers the inevitable: What are the most common tinnitus frequencies? Too many concerts in your youth will do this to us all!
• CNN Business returns some significant numbers: Microsoft tried a 4-day workweek in Japan. Productivity jumped 40%!
• Ben Burgis over at Jacobin laments A 32-Hour Workweek Is Long Overdue.Agreed!

April 2023

• The Guardian reports that rock mega-band Metallica buy vinyl factory as format outsells CDs for first time in US since 1987
• Wall Street Journal (paywall?) repeats the above: Vinyl Records Outsell CDs for the First Time Since 1987
• Ever wonder how they pack a stereo signal in one record groove? This quick visual tutorial will turn you onto the 45 degree difference!
• Current offers a peek behind NPR’s signature sound with an in-depth story from its top audio engineer.
• Yes, even libraries are moving to the internet. For example, have you seen the Digital Public Library of America?
• Need to make a DVD of Family Videos? Check out this free DVDStyler - Free DVD Authoring Application to author your DVD with menus and title screens!
• The Guardian witnesses South Korea U-turns on 69-hour working week after youth backlash.. Imagine a 69 hour work week being the government minimum!
• In the Someday It Will Pass sentiment, This Bill Would Make the Four-Day Workweek a Federal Law in the US.

March 2023

• Chris Dalla Riva over at Tedium asks and answers: Why Do Modern Pop Songs Have So Many Credited Writers? (TLDR: Too Many Producers, Too Few Royalties!)
• Been to a Live Rock Show lately? You might have seen the work of Pennsylvania's Rock Lititz. Esquire Magazine takes you inside the Amish Country Factory that Makes Tours for BTS, Beyonce and More (from 2020)
• CB over at Sporks Space complains about Poor schemas, poor cataloguing: why music tagging sucks. This longer essay goes into details about the minutia of metadata and tags, and the mess that it is.
• As we switch from owning physical media to digital files, you might be asking How do I make a physical donation to the Internet Archive? First, check if they accept it, and if they don't already have it before sending to them!
• On that same note, Publishers Weekly reports on the Oral Argument Set in Internet Archive Copyright Case, where they'll start scanning and loaning digital library books to a worldwide audience (if they win the case - Four Major Publishers are fighting this tooth and nail!)
• In an other hand, The Register reports that AI generated artwork can't be copyrighted by the US Copyright Office. While the artwork can't be copyrighted, the layout, cropping and overlaid type might be... Depends when the human gets involved. Feel free to steal any AI generated images with impunity!
• Back to our favorite subject - shorter work weeks! The BBC News follows up on the 4 Day Week Global, a trial that took place between June and December 2022 with 61 UK firms and around 2,900 employees - offering 100% pay for 80% of the time. It was such a good idea, The BBC reports that firms are sticking to four-day week after trial ends!
• Jealous Much? Bernie Sanders Say It's Time for a Four-Day Work Week (according to the Business Insider who checked his Twitter feed)
• Even Canadians are clamoring for it, with Globalnews.ca asking A four-day work week can be ‘life-changing.’ Should Canadians get one?
• Still unconvinced? The BBC Future slings the many climate benefits of a four-day workweek.

February 2023

• WIRED gives a little peek behind the scenes of How Vinyl Records Are Made courtesy Third Man Records [7'45" Runtime - Embedded below]
• Statista charts The Vinyl Comeback Continues, which concludes that vinyl LPs appear to have become a bit of collectors' item for fans, who listen to music digitally but still want to own a physical object: but only 50 percent of vinyl buyers actually have a record player!
• Ted Gioia [The Honest Broker] asks the hard questions: Did the Music Business Just Kill the Vinyl Revival?
• Dominique Cyprès writes a long and well-noted love letter to compact cassettes on his Sweet & Sour Notes
• Ken Fritz has built the world's greatest stereo system is inside his Virginia home as detailed in the new documentary "One Man's Dream"
• Dominic Szablewski pitches a new audio format Quite OK Audio (QOA), a lossy, time domain audio compression format with a constant bitrate of 277 kbits/s for stereo audio
• Hackaday (my favorite blog) shows off hacker Daniel Rojas who hilariously upgraded old tech with new technology, and made this Wireless MiniDisc Walkman Has Bluetooth Inside, so wireless audio for your wireless device?
• Jason Scott, archivist from the Internet Archive and a fellow gear-head, talks long and hard about Archiving in the Time of Streaming
• Foone Turing hilariously details about lost video formats (in this case: Cartrivision) and his lament: I own porn I can't watch.
• Torie Bosch admits the impossible over at The Slate: My Husband Was Right About DVDs All Along (a testament to owning media vs. streaming it.)
• Insider has the full story of purposefully cultivating rareness through select destruction with the '80s VHS Sold for $80,600 After YouTubers Said They Destroyed 100 Copies (the VHS in question, 'Nukie' is a terrible E.T. knockoff not worth the money paid for it)
• Seems to be a returning theme of audio visualizers, but we found David Lu over at Medium shows off his Audioscope - A Perceptually Meaningful Audio Visualizer
• PsyPost sums up the Health Economics Review: Working fewer hours is associated with higher life satisfaction, according to new research
• BNN Bloomberg starts strong with the claim that the Four-day work week gaining mainstream momentum in corporate Canada, albeit they still expect 40 hours/week - i.e. 10-hour days!

January 2023

Happy New Year! Time to whip out your resolutions list and add 'Clean out my families cherished old vinyl/tape media and get it converted to digital formats at Under Design!' We'd really appreciate it!

• Hyperstep is a web-based volumetric audio visualizer that can be a entertaining tool to turn audio (from your microphone, or uploaded) into a visual model, that can be rotated, zoomed and more in 3D space (that's my voice humming as a blue box with a circle in the center to the the right!). This determinedly beta project as found by the developers post on Y Combinator where he speaks of some bugs and project goals .
• Ars Technica reports on a 3D nanolithography tool that allowed Danish physicists give the gift of world’s smallest Christmas stereo record - it's under 50 nm small!
• Check out Korea's Only LP Records Manufacturing Factory and their Vinyl Record Mass Production Process in 10'53 runtime. available on YouTube [Embedded below]
• Our friends across the pond at The Vinyl Factory offer up a short list of their best ranked and reviewed turntables of last year.
• This heartwarming story of A Cassette Tape Reunited Me With My Father's Voice over at Shondaland really rings true, and it's why we still provide high quality compact cassette tape conversion for these situations!
• I can't tell if this is tongue-in-cheek, or simply a tutorial aimed at Gen-Z, but The Audio Owl shows you the basics of Blank Cassette Tape Types and How To Choose The Right One. Good luck finding a well-maintained tape deck, or supplier of blank tapes!
• Sounds May Affect Your Sense of Taste? Find out more in the 2'22 Runtime YouTube Video [Embedded below]
• What's the Swiss Army Knife of Lossless Video/Audio Editing? I'd say LosslessCut - a better way to edit video and remove unwanted sections without requiring a re-encode. Perhaps, like removing commercials from broadcast TV? Give it a try!
• Joshua Bird goes into super-finite detail in his well-documented 3D Printed Film Video Camera, which shoots onto (common?) 35mm film rolls. He claims it's an expensive and unreliable way to record low quality videos, which I can appreciate!
• Speaking of less hours for equal pay, seems like CNN Business repeats what the organizers say: Global 4-day week pilot was a huge success! (limited to 33 companies and 903 workers, so not a huge test!)