There are complex interactions between tape speed, track width, frequency response, and dynamic range. This article is an attempt to summarize the major influences.

A new flashlight for 2008: The Surefire Backup!

I bought this in spring 2008 and it is wonderful. Almost as much light as the L4, 2/3 the size, single 123 cell with an hour at full brightness, almost a day at the dimmer setting, and the beam is narrower so it really throws well. This one light may be all I need!

My 2003 favorite flashlight:

The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected an attempt from left-wing organizations to have the court reconsider a ruling that found unelected bureaucrats were wrong to accept thousands of undated or incorrectly dated ballots during the 2020 election.

A three-judge panel for the 3rd Circuit ruled in a 2-1 decision in March that any mail-in ballots that arrive in envelopes missing a date or with an incorrect date are invalid, upholding a state law and overturning a lower court’s decision.

Several left-wing organizations appealed the ruling by petitioning the court to review the decision en banc, a petition which was denied on Tuesday. It’s a big blow for Democrat operative and Russia hoaxer Marc Elias, whose group supported the lawsuit against the state law and which called it a “crucial” and “critical” case ahead of 2024. //

The panel for the 3rd Circuit overturned Baxter’s ruling, admitting that while their immediate reaction would be to find that a “failure to date a return envelope should not cause his ballot to be disqualified,” their role was simply to determine when the Materiality Provision can be applied.

“We hold that the Materiality Provision only applies when the State is determining who may vote,” Judge Thomas Ambra wrote. “In other words, its role stops at the door of the voting place. The provision does not apply to rules, like the date requirement, that govern how a qualified voter must cast his ballot for it to be counted.”

Samplitude Pro X provides recording and mixing engineers with sophisticated functions and a revolutionary DAW workflow. Edit in real time, during recording. Apply effects in a custom manner to individual clips. Visualize volume, frequency and phase information for selected tracks. Use batch export for automated editing of multiple files at once. Shape your sound – with more detail, efficiency and control.

Session is an end-to-end encrypted messenger that minimises sensitive metadata, designed and built for people who want absolute privacy and freedom from any form of surveillance.

If other audio CD extraction solutions have left you feeling perplexed, you will love Easy Audio Copy. The application guides you through the process step by step. There are no complex configurations, nor additional components to be downloaded. Everything works straight out of the box! During the extraction process, Easy Audio Copy is able to handle all the necessary decision-making itself. The user is asked only a few questions about their preferences.

• Is Easy Audio Copy as reliable and exact as Exact Audio Copy?
  Yes, Easy Audio Copy is at least as reliable and exact as Exact Audio Copy as they are based on the same extraction methods. Easy Audio Copy benefits from various optimisations which increase extraction speed but ensure the reliability. The main difference is the interface which is much simpler and can be used without any background knowledge of the processes involved.

Exact Audio Copy is a so called audio grabber for audio CDs using standard CD and DVD-ROM drives. The main differences between EAC and most other audio grabbers are :

• It is free (for non-commercial purposes)
• It works with a technology, which reads audio CDs almost perfectly. If there are any errors that can’t be corrected, it will tell you on which time position the (possible) distortion occurred, so you could easily control it with e.g. the media player

With other audio grabbers you usually need to listen to every grabbed wave because they only do jitter correction. Scratched CDs read on CD-ROM drives often produce distortions. But listening to every extracted audio track is a waste of time. Exact Audio Copy conquer these problems by making use of several technologies like multi-reading with verify and AccurateRip.

ere are a list of my picks of free and low-cost software tools. I am sticking with Samplitude Professional for audio and Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom for photo-graphics. The other alternatives, however, are wide open.

Advanced Renamer is a program for renaming multiple files and folders at once. By configuring renaming methods the names can be manipulated in various ways.

It is easy to set up a batch job using multiple methods on a large amount of files. The 14 different methods enables you to change the names, attributes, and timestamps of files in one go. The files can also be copied or moved to new locations based on information in the files.

With Advanced Renamer you can construct new file names by adding, removing, replacing, changing case, or giving the file a brand new name based on known information about the file.

Before performing the operations on the files you can verify that the output will be correct and if you perform the rename and regret it, you can undo the complete batch.

The International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA) has released their landmark Guidelines on the Production and Preservation of Digital Audio Objects as a free web (HTML) edition, available here. http://www.iasa-web.org/tc04/audio-preservation

A variety of noise reduction processing was used This processing was a double-ended system where the record processor boosted certain frequencies and portions of the dynamic range while the playback processor provided a complementary reduction of the signal. These systems are generally referred to as companders for compressor-expander. Two different manufacturers of companders achieved high market penetration. Two others did not, but that is not to say that their equipment was not used somewhere. To the best of my knowledge, no one has written a Direct-X-type plug-in for a computer, so you are stuck having to buy the playback processors for each system you wish to reproduce.

At some point, this tape was played on a 1/4-track machine that injected hum onto the left channel. Here’s what the magnetic viewer showed:

At the very top we can see a remnant of the left channel material, then the 120-Hz bars (62.5 mil spacing), then the remainder of the left channel material. In the middle is the guard band and at the bottom, the right channel.

July 20, 2018
Website Notice

Note: This website (moonviews.com) has not been regularly updated since 2014. Now that the project’s data has been submitted to NASA, this website will no longer be updated but will be maintained as an online archive of the LOIRP’s prior activities. Thank you for your interest in – and support of – our project. //

The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP) is a project to digitize the original analog data tapes from the five Lunar Orbiter spacecraft that were sent to the Moon in 1966 and 1967; it is funded by NASA, SkyCorp, SpaceRef Interactive, and private individuals.[1]

The first image to be successfully recovered by the project was released in November 2008. It was the first photograph of the Earth from the Moon, taken in August 1966. On February 20, 2014, the project announced it had completed the primary tape capture portion of the project.[2] One medium resolution image, most of one high resolution image and parts of three others are missing, apparently due to lapses at the time they were being recorded.[3] The rest of the Lunar Orbiter images have been successfully recovered[2] and have been published in NASA's Planetary Data System.

This image (click on image to enlarge) shows the sequence of images that were read out during what is termed “priority” readout vs the “final readout”. The priority readout was an opportunistic scanning of processed photos on the lunar orbiter before all of the images were taken. The photo process with the 70mm film began with an image being simultaneously taken by the 610 mm high resolution camera and by the 80 mm medium resolution camera. In a process remarkably similar to the old polaroid dry process instamatic cameras, the film was dry processed by a “bimat” dry processor. The bimat would separate from the film (most of the time) but would sometimes due to the timing would leave artifacts on the image, which are readily identified on the film.

The film would then be fed into the readout looper where it could be scanned and the images sent back to the Earth. During the mission when photographs were still being taken the film would run one direction through the looper. After all of the images were taken a command would be sent to cut the bimat and then the film could be read in the opposite direction.

Thus when we start with a low numbered tape, the first images that come off are from the priority readout in ascending order. However, the ascending order is not linear, jumping because images are still being taken and the film advancing while the spacecraft cannot transmit.

At 12.56 pm on 21 July 1969 Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST), mankind took its 'one giant leap' and 600 million people watched as Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon.

Our Parkes radio telescope, Murriyang, famously supported receiving the television signals on that momentous day. Although many people think the Parkes telescope was the only station receiving the signal, it was the 26-metre antenna at NASA's Honeysuckle Creek space tracking station near Canberra that was the prime station assigned with receiving the initial TV pictures from the Moon and Neil Armstrong's first steps on the lunar surface. (The Tidbinbillla deep space tracking station, today known as the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex, provided support to the command module in lunar orbit.)

Eight and a half minutes after those first historic images were broadcast around the world, the television signal being received by the larger 64-metre Parkes radio telescope, Murriyang, was then selected by NASA to provide the images for the following two hours and 12 minutes of live broadcast as the Apollo 11 astronauts explored the Moon surface.

“I’ve spent the past week in Mountain View, California, hanging out with a group of Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP) hackers who are working out of an abandoned McDonald’s on the NASA Ames base. For more than five years, LOIRP technologists (or techno-archeologists, as they prefer to be called) have been reverse-engineering analog tape drives and developing new software in an attempt to unearth some of the first images of the moon that were taken by unmanned lunar orbiters in advance of the manned Apollo missions of the late 1960s. Upon entering the building (affectionately called “McMoon’s” by those who work within it) for the first time, I was greeted by familiar architecture. The drive-thru windows, menu light boxes, stainless steel counters, fiber glass tables and the ghosts of corporate brand ephemera all remain. However now they coexist under a jolly roger with a literal mountain of vintage 2-inch tape reels that contain trapped data, refrigerator-sized Ampex tape drives, an army of Mac workstations and a seemingly endless supply of analog tape decks, monitors, cables and soldering supplies.”

“Our memory is dissipating. Hard drives only last five years, a webpage is forever changing and there’s no machine left that reads 15-year old floppy disks. Digital data is vulnerable. Yet entire libraries are shredded and lost to budget cuts, because we assume everything can be found online. But is that really true? For the first time in history, we have the technological means to save our entire past, yet it seems to be going up in smoke. Will we suffer from collective amnesia?”
The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project is featured starting at 17:15. This segment was filmed in early 2014.

Vigilant migration of data as new storage techniques become available is the only way to assure long-term preservation. Even if the IRIG tapes are found, we are almost at the point where the tapes would be un-decipherable. I think one of my machines could play them (I say think as I’ve never tested it to full 500 kHz bandwidth), but I don’t have the specialized video decoder. NASA apparently preserved some equipment should the tapes ever show up.

This also raises another spectre. We MUST be selective as to what we keep in our archives because if we keep everything we won’t be able to afford it–or find it. This is one of the key jobs that archivists do. However, blindly following retention practices, as was done by NASA for the IRIG Apollo 11 tapes, needs to be tempered by historians as well. Certain small subsets of data (moonwalk slow scan video) are much more important than others (astronauts’ blood pressure and other biometrics throughout the entire flight).

All organizations who keep archives need to address this. In a generation (or less) if we save everything, it will become an overwhelming burden and the high points will be lost if they are not properly indexed.

I finally figured out how to power the Sennheiser MKH-104, 404, and 804 from 48 V phantom power (P48) which is very common on professional and many prosumer mixers and recorders. The MKH-X04 series requires -8V for operation. Please note that some portable recorders do not generate P48 even on their XLR connectors. This will not work with P12 or P24 inputs. It works like a charm on P48 inputs (at least from Mackie, Yamaha, and Sound Devices). Thanks to everyone for their input and assistance.

Today, 48 V phantom powering is almost universal. In phantom powering the positive voltage is fed through a pair 6k81 ohm resistors, one to each modulation lead. The matching of these resistors is often done to 0.1% to maintain common mode rejection. The negative power runs on the mic shield. XLR: Pin 1-shield; Pin 2-audio hot, +48 V; Pin 3-audio low, +48 V. Tuchel: Pin 1-audio hot, +48 V; Pin 2-shield; Pin 3-audio low, +48 V. This was standardized in the 1960s in DIN Standard 45596. //

Prior to standardization, in 1964, Schoeps produced the CMT-20 microphone which used negative 8.5 V phantom power. The CMT-200, according to Schoeps drawing SB316, dated 1964-10-14, used the same -8.5 V phantom. Later this was broadened to negative 8-12V phantom followed by the switch to positive phantom at some later point. With vintage microphones, at least from Schoeps, be very careful as they might be negative phantom.