OT: Turntables (was RE: Brainboost.com)

[Bill Vermillion]

On Mon, Jun 07, 2004 at 10:04:13AM -0700, Bob Rasmussen thus spoke:
> 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 )

Completely OT as far as FP is concerned but,

Years and years ago I felt the classic River Deep and Mountain High
had transistion problems in the middle - as it is essentially three
songs put together.  I spent hours and almost had what I thought
was a good tranisition and never got it right.

Ellie co-wrote that along with Jeff Barry and Phil Spector.

A couple of years after that Ellie called me promoting one of here
her recordings and I mentioned this to her.

She said all three of them felt the same way about the song when
they wrote it, but they could never come up with smoother
transistion.  I guess it's one of those things that is best if you
stop at a certain point, as that has gone on to become a classic
and at one time The Beatles regarded is the best song ever.

> 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).

Sounds about like the original Microsoft Sound card - another HW
mistake from Redmond - that I had for a short while - but that goes
back to the 3.1 days.  I think I still have it around here if
anyone SERIOUSLY wants it as a collector.

> 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.

Clicks and pops come from treating LPs like magazines and not
like books. I also have a vacuum system for LP, and you can
remove almost all clicks and pops with wet-playing. I found a
replacement for my old Lenco Wet Playing attachemnt on a German
site, but got no repsonse from my English letter to the people
there.

> 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.

I would have like to have seen that.

Bill

-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com