OT: Turntables (was RE: Brainboost.com)

[Bob Rasmussen]

On Mon, 7 Jun 2004, John Esak wrote:

> Maybe I'll find one and send it to you.. You are one person I would guess
> still has a turntable... (and knows what a stylus is...) :-)

I still have one! And there's a story there...

Three years ago I was playing rehearsal piano for the high school musical.
The play was "Leader of the Pack - the Ellie Greenwich Musical". We had a
musical score, but no cast album. Of course the kids wanted CDs to listen
to in order to learn their music.

(Ellie Greenwich wrote many of the girl band hits of the 60s. See
elligreenwich.com )

I spent the better part of one day trying to find an album. Early on I
found a few MIDI transcriptions. I googled all over the web, and found one
album being offered on eBay. However, I lost the bidding. Finally it
occurred to me to use my experience and connections into the library
world, and I did a country-wide search for a copy I could get through
inter-library loan. I found ONE, in Seattle (I'm in Portland, 200 miles
away). I reserved it for pickup, and had an uncle, who was coming this
way, pick it up for me.

I dusted off the turntable, fired it up, and determined that I could play
most tracks of the double album, although those at the edge had some skip
(which I later had to explain to the kids). Now, how to digitize it?
Without spending any money :-)

My Windows system had a sound recorder, but it was limited to 60 seconds
(showing its age). It turns out I had recently had requests for support
for sound and other "multimedia" in Anzio, and had created a command in
Anzio that fed directly into a Windows API call, MciSendString, that is a
sort of command mode for multimedia.

In the end I was able to create an Anzio macro that would record an entire
song, and another one to stop recording and close the file. I put a
30-foot extension cord between the stereo system in my bedroom and the PC
in the family room, and got my digitization. I didn't do anything to clean
up clicks and pops (remember those? Aren't CDs nice?) Soon the kids had
their headphones humming.

The show turned out to be a huge hit with parents and grandparents, who
remembered all the music, the big hairdos, the dancing, and so forth.

Regards,
....Bob Rasmussen,   President,   Rasmussen Software, Inc.

personal e-mail: ras at anzio.com
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