Welcome to the Analog To Digital Blog! Here at Under Design's Audio+ Conversion Services, we monitor the news for stories and interesting web posts that might interest our customers (they certainly piqued our curiosity!) - links focus on copyright, tips and tricks for managing your library, media history and more related to Analog To Digital conversion and technology. Have a newsworthy story or tip?Submit it via our contact form at the bottom of our FAQ!
Sections are sorted by date descending, all links open in a new window
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!
Developer Matthew Bird releases his Open source separation of music into constituent instruments Audio Decomposition in his effort to turn songs into sheet music!
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...
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!
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.
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...
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.
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.
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!
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!
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.
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 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
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.
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....
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.
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.
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!
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!
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!
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.
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.
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.
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]
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
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.
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.
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 felthemp turntable mats are not included.
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).
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!)
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!
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!
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!
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?
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!
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]
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!
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!)