Allegro moderato From Piano Concerto In F Sharp Minor Op.20
Alexander Scriabin
(free) 333-page technical document on sound restoration titled "Manual of Analog Sound Restoration Techniques." It's written by Peter Copeland of The National Sound Archive in England (part of the British Library Board), and it's a remarkable and interesting document.
I don't agree with everything Copeland says, but he makes a number of good points in his report, and there's a lot of very good information in it, particularly on vinyl restoration techniques. Apparently Copeland died in 2006 without finishing the manuscript; parts of it are in desperate need of editing, and the info is dated in sports, but there's still a treasure-trove of good information there. Note that Copeland's approach is very scientific and engineering-based; subjective audiophiles may take issue with some of his opinions.
It's available as a free PDF at this link:
http://www.bl.uk/collections/sound-archive/pdf/analoguesoundrestoration.pdf
Copeland reportedly put about ten years of research into writing the document, and it's very well-done. Anybody who's trying to do restoration and mastering of vinyl, 78RPM discs, and analog tape should read it.
The Federal Aviation Administration is the subject of a massive class action lawsuit alleging that since 2013, thousands of qualified applicants have been denied employment as air traffic controllers based on race. //
These programs, run in cooperation with the FAA since 1991 to train and test future air traffic controllers, were the entry point for the overwhelming majority of the ATC workforce.
In 2013, the Obama Administration ended the program to increase diversity in ATC hiring. The screening test stopped being ATC-specific coursework and became a "biographical questionnaire." Allegedly, this questionnaire was based on the personality traits of successful ATCs. But its real purpose was to increase the number of "underrepresented" demographics. As if to underscore the point, the FAA provided the correct candidates with a list of buzzwords to use on the questionnaire. Minority applicants were also coached on how to format their job applications so friendly selection board members could recognize them. //
For reasons that aren't all that clear, this racially discriminatory hiring program continued under Donald Trump, but it really hit high gear under Joe Biden. I swear I'm not making any of this up.
The Secretary of Transportation has set a hiring goal of three (3) percent per fiscal year for individuals with targeted (severe) disabilities. //
In 2023, the situation had deteriorated to the point that even the New York Times had noticed.
They were part of an alarming pattern of safety lapses and near misses in the skies and on the runways of the United States, a Times investigation found. While there have been no major U.S. plane crashes in more than a decade, potentially dangerous incidents are occurring far more frequently than almost anyone realizes — a sign of what many insiders describe as a safety net under mounting stress. //
It is difficult to see how this policy survives a legal challenge. The American Bar Association cautions that under current Supreme Court precedents, diversity hiring cuts two ways.
Diversity initiatives should not be a zero sum game. Lawful diversity initiatives should be designed to expand opportunity for underrepresented groups without also negatively impacting opportunities for those in the majority.
The late Peter Copeland wrote a handbook concerning analogue sound restoration. It is required reading. When Peter died in 2006, I despaired that this would ever see the light of day. In 2008-09, the British Library released it as a free PDF file available here.
The IASA “Green Book” TC-04 Guidelines on the Production and Preservation of Digital Audio Objects can be purchased from IASA. The Second Edition is available online.
The CoOL (Conservation On Line) site has many resources. In particular, read Gilles St-Laurent’s 1996 article on The Care and Handling of Recorded Sound Materials.
The National Recording Preservation Board of the Library of Congress and the Council on Library and Information Resources March 2006 Capturing Analog Sound for Digital Preservation: Report of a Roundtable Discussion of Best Practices for Transferring Analog Discs and Tapes
This Tape Timing Chart is approximate. Most reels will contain a bit more tape than indicated time implies, typically about 6%. The footage is actual.
These timings are for one program. There can be as many as four mono programs on one 1/4-inch tape.
This document discusses the speeds used for most analog magnetic tape recording.
See the tape timing chart to convert speeds and lengths into times.
Note throughout most of the rest of this document we are using the correct ISO form of in/s instead of i.p.s. which is the traditional way of stating "inches per second".
One of the challenges for good sound reinforcement or speech recording is keeping the speaker “on mic”. There are many ways of handling this, but some work better than others. Here are my favourites:
- If the room is quiet and you can do a proper setup, a pair of Sennheiser MKH-416 short shotgun mics, one for the interviewer and one for the interviewee, gives very natural and unselfconscious results.
- For larger groups, I’ve had good results with an Audio Technica AT-822 (or the phantom-powered AT-825) stereo microphone, but the actual voice quality of that mic is inferior to the MKH-416. The high-end is harsher, but, used at a greater distance that is often not as noticeable. The room needs to be very quiet for this to work well, however. This is currently my least favourite approach (of those listed).
- So far, some of the best pickup I have found is a headworn mic–the main subject of this post.
At our church, they had tried headworn mics from Shure and they really were uncomfortable. Whoever selected the units, selected dynamic units and they did not sound all that good. They were retired in favour of the Countryman E6 units (also available from Shure, although I prefer the direct-from-Countryman version with the 2mm cable for robustness).
The Countryman units were working reasonably well, but never seemed to stay in the same place. It was frustrating as it was causing a widely varying sound quality, so we decided to try a DPA 4066 headworn mic on our head priest. The results were outstanding. The unit is comfortable (no more sore ears), it stays put, and it sounds better!
It is no surprise that these are taking over the religious and theatre markets.
Creative works may not have intellectual property protections for a number of reasons. In most cases, the rights have expired or have been forfeited. Basically, no one holds the exclusive rights to these works, meaning that living artists today can sample and build off those works legally without asking anyone’s permission to do so.
That’s why the New York Public Library (NYPL) has been reviewing the U.S. Copyright Office’s official registration and renewals records for creative works whose copyrights haven’t been renewed, and have thus been overlooked as part of the public domain.
The books in question were published between 1923 and 1964, before changes to U.S. copyright law removed the requirement for rights holders to renew their copyrights. According to Greg Cram, associate general counsel and director of information policy at NYPL, an initial overview of books published in that period shows that around 65 to 75 percent of rights holders opted not to renew their copyrights.
But corporate mega-publishers want purchasing a book to be like renting a movie or streaming an album. //
Buying a book should be no different from buying an apple. When you buy an apple, the farmer can’t show up in your kitchen later and decide your time is up, and you’ve got to pay for it again. It’s yours forever—to eat, or paint in a still life, or cut up for a kid’s snack. And thanks to the first sale doctrine of copyright law, codified by Congress in 1909, the books on your shelves are yours forever, too, in exactly the same way your apple is; you’re free to read them (or not), loan them to friends, or sell them to a used bookshop, without restriction. Copyright law balances the public good—our collective right to access information—with the rights it grants to authors and inventors.
Publishers can’t demand more money for the paper books you’ve already bought, but the technology for copying and distributing books has evolved a lot since 1909. So four titanic corporate publishers are currently in court, insisting on the effective right to barge in and demand multiple, recurring payments for digital books–like they do for digital movies, music, and software–and they want to exercise that same power over the books in libraries.
This threat to the ownership of books is what makes the ongoing publishers’ lawsuit against the Internet Archive politically dangerous, and in an altogether different way from earlier challenges and amendments to copyright law. At a time of increasing book bannings and attacks on libraries, public schools and universities, it is not safe for democracy, or for our cultural posterity, to leave an “on/off” switch for library books in the hands of corporate publishers. //
As I’ve argued before, the lawsuit hinges on the question of whether ebooks are books, subject to the existing laws governing the sale of books, or whether the publishers can redefine ebooks as temporary, rental-only media–a new class of unownable goods, like streaming-only films from Disney or subscription-only software from Microsoft. But libraries must have the option to buy and own their books–all their books, including ebooks–and own them absolutely, like an apple. //
In the summer of 2020, Hachette, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, and Wiley accused the Internet Archive of “mass-scale copyright infringement” because of the way the Internet Archive’s Open Library loans its ebooks to patrons. Instead of renting their ebooks from publishers, the Internet Archive scans them from the paper books it owns, stores the paper originals, and loans each scan out to only one patron at a time, a common library practice known as Controlled Digital Lending (CDL). Following the reasoning of expert copyright lawyers and library scholars over the last twelve years, the Internet Archive, along with hundreds of other libraries and archival institutions, maintains that CDL is a fair and logical way to preserve traditional library practices for the digital world. //
The publishers’ objective had been to forbid the Open Library to loan any of their in-copyright books as ebooks. That was the explicit request in the original complaint. But not even this industry-friendly judge was willing to go that far; he sided with the Internet Archive’s interpretation of the decision instead. For now, the Open Library will have to stop loaning only those ebooks for which the publishers are offering their own “competing” ebooks for license. In other words, the order relies solely on the argument that the Open Library is harming the publishers’ revenues from ebooks, a distinction that seems to go to the heart of the dispute. //
The publishers shouldn’t be able to pick and choose the bits of copyright law they want to abide by; as we’ve noted, copyright law balances the public good with commercial rights. If publishers’ ebook revenues are protected by the extant provisions of copyright law protecting rights holders, then, presumably, readers and libraries should also be protected. The Internet Archive, and all libraries, should have the same protections under the first sale doctrine that have always allowed them to preserve and lend books to readers.
The bottom-line is that destroying the originals after digitizing them should not be taken lightly. Really think about the implications. Put yourself 10 - 20 years in the future and think about what the implications of your decision might be. Is destroying the originals a decision that you will regret (or that your successors will regret)?
Md5Checker is a free, faster, lightweight and easy-to-use tool to manage, calculate and verify MD5 checksum of multiple files/folders (Screenshots):
- Calculate and display MD5 checksum of multiple files at one time.
- Use MD5 checksum to fleetly verify whether files have been changed.
- Load, save, add, remove and update MD5 checksum conveniently.
- It is about 300 KB and does not require any installation (portable).
A New Year’s view of at-risk audio formats
2024-02-20
2015-01-11
This article was first written in January 2015, with minor revisions in 2018. The revisions made in 2024 are highlighted, like this line. The deletions are struck through.
There are many factors that affect the ability of people like us to digitize tapes for you, our clients.
One of the most difficult issues to balance is the physical space that different formats take up, the ongoing maintenance of these formats, and, to be brutally honest, their return on investment.
What we discovered is that some of the machines we were archiving for future use would not work when they were brought out of storage. Rubber parts, capacitors, and lubrication are probably the most prevalent causes of failure. We have said to clients more than once (with a wry smile), “Yes we can probably restore your tape, but first we need to restore a machine.”
Manufacturer and maintenance depot support for various formats is waning or fully discontinued. Parts are hard to come by, and good machinists with an interest in doing this are either non-existent or very expensive.
So, what formats are at risk:
The benefits of using a voltage audio transmission system in broadcast facilities is investigated. State of the art microphone preamplifier requirements and an ideal voltage system distribution amplifier are outlined. The application of the Peak Program Meter to the new systems and the modified installation at WABC-TV are covered.
Introduction
Over the years, many audio practices have been followed without anyone asking WHY? or IS THERE A BETTER WAY?
The [then (i.e. 1980)] present [but now deprecated] standard for Broadcast Audio Systems is EIA Standard RS 219 [1]. In light of the fact that the [then] current standard was published in 1959 (and this was merely a reaffirmation of an earlier standard), one might imagine that in relation to today's common audio practices, it is somewhat archaic.
One in five mail-in voters admitted to violating election laws in 2020, which should have disqualified their ballots. Further details are even worse. //
The Heartland Institute/Rasmussen survey, which was conducted from Nov. 30 to Dec. 6, asked likely voters who cast ballots in 2020 questions about fraudulent activities, without telling them such actions were a form of voter fraud. The results were stunning. One in five people who voted by mail admitted to engaging in at least one kind of potential voter fraud, seriously calling into question the security of widespread mail-in balloting.
For example, one question asked, “During the 2020 election, did you cast a mail-in ballot in a state where you were no longer a permanent resident?” Such an action nearly always constitutes fraud. Incredibly, 17 percent of voters said “yes.” //
It’s an incredibly important finding since that contest involved more mail-in ballots than any other election in U.S. history. Election officials report that of 159 million ballots cast in 2020, more than 68 million were submitted by mail, about 43 percent of the total. In addition, as the MIT Election Data and Science Lab noted, “the dramatic increase in the raw number of absentee ballots cast was accompanied by a significant decrease in the overall absentee rejection rate for the country: from 0.96 percent in 2016 to 0.79 percent in 2020.”
If the recent Heartland Institute/Rasmussen survey is accurate and one in five ballots were, in fact, fraudulent, that would suggest greater than 13 million ballots should not have been counted nationwide in 2020. That’s far more than the margin of victory for President Biden in the popular vote, about 7 million.
As troubling as these findings are, however, additional questions in the Heartland Institute/Rasmussen survey suggest voter fraud and illegal voting may have been even worse than the one-in-five figure suggests. For instance, 8 percent of all respondents — not just those who voted by mail — said they were offered “pay” or “reward” in return for voting. //
Another survey conducted in March and April by the Heartland Institute and Rasmussen shows that 28 percent of likely voters now say they would commit at least one form of illegal voting during the 2024 election, “if given the opportunity.” Interestingly, respondents’ willingness to commit fraud was similar among Republicans, Democrats, and independents. //
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, just three states require notaries for mail-in ballots — Mississippi, Missouri, and Oklahoma. Only nine additional states mandate that a voter obtain one or more non-notary witness signatures when casting a ballot by mail. Most states require neither a witness nor a notary to verify signatures.
Lawmakers must ensure widespread voter fraud does not happen in future elections. That can only occur if mail-in voting systems are radically improved. Time is running out for legislators to fix these major threats to American self-government.
The Federalist asked NARA whether the pallets shipped by GSA included the documents that were later confiscated by Smith’s team during their raid of Mar-a-Lago, and NARA’s media staff responded that the agency had “no awareness about the contents of the materials on the pallets and had no involvement in the move project that is referenced in the GSA emails.”
“NARA was harassing Trump throughout 2021 for what they insisted were government records apparently WITHOUT contacting GSA to search dozens of boxes in their possession,” Kelly observed.
Under the new plan, however, all such habitats would be categorically off-limits as soon as it is discovered that the land is occupied by a listed species. Any potential impacts to endangered species habitats that are discovered in the course of site surveys (usually after millions of dollars have already been expended on the project application) would kill the project entirely.
The permitting risk, already prohibitive for many new projects, could put whole states beyond the reach of all but the most hardy (or foolish) developers. The solar energy areas under the new solar plan overlap substantially with areas containing multiple endangered and threatened species. This endangered species exclusion alone would eliminate virtually all new solar development in Utah, Nevada, and Arizona, which lead the nation in solar capacity per acre. //
Even for the 14% of BLM land left available for solar project development after all these exclusions, the new plan imposes onerous permitting requirements. These include some 600 mandatory design elements.
Some of these verge on the comical. BLM proposes a blanket prohibition on “grading” (leveling out land), which is indispensable for access roads, utility-scale batteries, transmission poles, and construction staging. The plan also prohibits development within 200 feet of ephemeral streams (those that come into existence, for example, after heavy rainfall, and then go away) and requires 75% residual vegetation around the development.
These requirements will be impossible to meet economically for many projects, and even where possible, would significantly expand the amount of land required per unit of electricity, thus defeating the goal of conservation. //
Most surprisingly, the new plan does not address any of the major problems that years of experience have revealed in the permitting process for solar and other energy projects on BLM land. On the contrary, it makes the permitting challenges even worse for existing projects applications, which are not “grandfathered” in any respect. Many solar project applications already in process will have to start over, and many of those applicants will prefer to cut their losses instead.
Many projects’ applications have been pending for years, and companies have already negotiated operational and power-purchase agreements of various kinds and would be bankrupted by having to start over.
This demonstrates a problem with heavily regulated sectors: Officials feel all too free to “move the goal posts” with little concern for the enormous losses they are causing developers and investors and little understanding that these are social losses that impact everybody.
For Americans to avoid a prolonged period of energy scarcity in the high-demand decade ahead, the nation will require a significant expansion in electricity generation. The bulk of that will need to come from nuclear and fossil sources, which are significantly more abundant, “energy dense,” and reliable than renewable sources like solar and wind. //
The new solar plan is being promoted as a partial solution, but even a brief review shows clearly that it will only make those problems worse. The plan is a clear sellout to left-wing environmentalists. And it shows that while those environmentalists hate fossil fuels, they don’t particularly love renewable energy—or energy of any kind.
They mean to save the planet for what they think is the planet’s sake, not for our sake. And if in the process they plunge the world into energy scarcity—a much grimmer fate than all the doomsday climate scenarios put together—in their minds, that’s just too bad for us.
Google is the internet librarian. Google leads all inquiries down the aisle that Google decides is best, and that is invariably and distinctly leftist aisles. Sure, you can eventually get to opposing opinions and relevant facts, but you have to work for it. //
When they look for information, they don’t read books; they Google. Politico, HuffPo, and Taylor Lorenz for example, are the end results. The search results tell them they live on a dying planet, that skin color trumps merit, and that gender has a spectrum. If contrary facts are presented to them, an inordinate number will scream and stick their fingers in their ears. A liberal niece of mine wrote something false online that she pulled off the internet. I corrected her, in private. Instead of correcting her mistake, she chose to “un-person” me. She hasn’t spoken to me in eight years. She went to Cal Berkley and majored in English. //
All cultures are not equal, and pretending that they are and instructing teachers to elevate all cultures to equal status makes a mockery of our own. One of the developers of Critical Race Theory does not belong in primary or secondary education. Critical thinking does.
How to stop indoctrination? I’m not sure. I hovered over the final paragraph for quite some time. I still don’t know. We might be at the point of no return. I hope not. I hope we are, instead, at a crossroads. Florida is leading the way with pedagogy designed to teach, not indoctrinate. Facts do matter. There is no gender spectrum. Math is not racist. Palestine was never a country. Let’s get back to facts, and maybe we can save the country. //
The Original John Doe
8 hours ago
"How to stop indoctrination?"
You might as well ask how to Unbrainwash someone. If you Google that you will see that nearly every site says step one is to re move the stimulus that is causing the brainwashing. This mean you would have to remove every leftists cell phone or remove every leftist news agency. This is basically impossible.
Therefore an examination of history is in order. Every country that successfully brainwashes at least 50% of its population (The United States has accomplished this) either ends up becoming a socialist/communist country or devolves into civil war. Keep in mind that the United States has already brainwashed 100% of the population into accepting an UNELECTED president in the White House for 3 years, 3 months, 9 days and counting with ZERO consequences.
After the stolen 2024 election, we shall see if conservatives will let the country become a socialist/communist regime or if something else will transpire. //
Sargon of Cincinnati
2 hours ago
The great Thomas Sowell fears we are past the tipping point. You are not alone in your questioning of if this indoctrination can be stopped.
The Fourmilab Units Calculator is based upon the GNU Units utility. It supports expressions in the “Convert” and “To” fields in the same syntax as described in the GNU Units manual. If the To field is left blank, the definition of the unit in the Convert field will be shown in terms of fundamental units. Entering “?” in the To field shows all standard units with the same dimensions as the expression in the Convert field. A total of 3460 linear units, 109 nonlinear units, and 109 prefixes are defined.
Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-driven effort to produce a collection of high quality, carefully formatted, accessible, open source, and free public domain ebooks that meet or exceed the quality of commercially produced ebooks. The text and cover art in our ebooks is already believed to be in the U.S. public domain, and Standard Ebooks dedicates its own work to the public domain, thus releasing the entirety of each ebook file into the public domain. All the ebooks we produce are distributed free of cost and free of U.S. copyright restrictions.