Album: JBL Sessions

Firefox -- sometimes when I have 25 or 30 things going and don't reboot for weeks at a time (I never shut down, just sleep) stuff gets kinda balky. I figure it's normal.

Computer arthritis.

Firefox does use a lot of memory, but it shouldn't crash. Was it the browser that crashed, or just lost the connection with the mail site?

Have you ever considered using an email client?

Finally finished "Sessions" last night.  Been working on it, what, since May?  Off and on.

And it *is* a pretty interesting disc.  It's dated-as-hell -- talks about "listening to records" and turning the record over, talks about studio time costing $8 per minute -- but the recordings are still top notch, 43 years later.  

In moments of weakness I idly wonder if I should offer my LP-to-CD services commercially -- until I remember that a tough case like this takes seven months to complete, thousands of hours.  Nobody could afford me, or I'd have to undervalue my services, or do a shitty job.  It's pretty labor-intensive to do it right.

You should write a program to do the scratch and pop removal.

There are lots of routines yhou can buy, I've tried several of them, the problem is, it's an art. Some music content looks exactly like noise. And noise comes in all sorts of guises.

For instance, on the "Sessions" LP, there's a lot of dialog back and forth between the musicians and the control room. Every time Dick Rosmini keys the mic in the control booth, it puts a click on the soundtrack that looks exactly like a record tick. But I wanted to keep those, as they're not extraneous noise.

They are traneous noise.

I wasn't talking about "routines", whatever those are.
A properly designed program would allow you to keep what you want and dispose of what you don't.

Each noise event requires a decision on what to do with it. Every event is unique. Amelioration ranges from redrawing the waveform to filtering a passage to, occasionally, editing it totally out. No program would be that flexible.

I have started in on another LP-->CD conversion, from a dub I found online -- which is very scratchy and has a nasty hum in it.  Unfortunately the LP itself is rather rare, and has never been released on CD, so my options are somewhat limited.

After spending the better part of today cleaning up the first 3.798 seconds of what is a 36-minute LP, I began looking online for options.  The digital audio workstation (DAW) software I'm using -- Audacity -- is pretty full-featured and has a very comprehensive online wiki of help/questions/answers.  The "Click and pop removal techniques" wiki recommends the built-in Click Removal routine, but no matter WHERE I set the parameters on it I get one of two results: audible clicks, or damaged audio.  There is no middle ground.

So I went to the second recommendation, "Repair."  This takes short (128 samples, or 1/344th of a second) section of audio and interpolates those samples with the 128 samples before, and the 128 samples after the section.  This works slicker-than-snake-snot and makes ticks and pops disappear completely, without having to redraw the waveform manually (which is what I did with JBL Sessions).

Shoot, this is as monumental a leap forward as when I discovered you could redraw the waveforms, rather than having to move the data points one-by-one!   Needless to say, I wish I'd discovered this sooner.

Now, not every 128 samples need to be redrawn.  I estimate that are about 3 pops per second.  So for 36 minutes of audio, 2160 seconds, I only have about 720 repairs to make.  I should be able to finish this in a day.

Or so.

Shoot. That's "three pops per second," not one pop every three seconds.

I'm looking at more like 6480 repairs

I think it's turning out to be something like ten times that.  

Some of the tracks weren't so bad -- a dozen pops per second, rather easily fixed over the last month, if somewhat tedious -- but the 5th and 6th tracks were COMPLETELY messed up, with major cracks or gunk in the grooves every revolution.  By applying some very severe filtering, I can take out the thumps that occur, and the high frequency "scritches" that occur.  I am inching forward, 0.2 seconds at a time, removing dozens of anomalies in every panel.

Sometimes though the damage is so great that the needle has skipped a groove.  Then I have to go back over the previous parts of the track and find some section that matches the time, and bassline, and drum pattern, and splice in a repair to the missing groove.

This is, believe it or not, fun for me.  The result I'm coming up with -- two minutes into a 5 minute song, that I've been working on for about ten days -- is not evident that it was damaged.

Mrs. NoCo said, "Oh Jesus.  Nobody's going to notice but you."

Which is EXACTLY the point!

Finished the CD project on Wednesday.  Played the finished CD in the car on Thursday.

The constant hum -- ungrounded turntable? -- almost made me pull over to see what was wrong with the car, until I came to the 2 seconds of silence between tracks.  But the music sounded pretty damn good.

The 6th track, the one in the worst shape, still sounded a little rough, with constant surface noise like an old 78 (but no ticks and pops).  But it's acceptable and I'm damn tired of working on it.

Done!  Move on.