Analog To Digital Blog Archives

December 2022

• Looking to buy a Turntable as a Beloved Holiday Gift? We agree with Hiconsumption & Design Milk: Audio-Technica’s AT-LP2022 Turntable Is Clearly Special! (pictured to the right - yes it's clear! It'll match any environment!)
• Must be the Holiday season, but we have a one-two punch from the United States Postal Service (USPS): First, a warning to avoid Using Blue Mailboxes During the Holidays, followed by extremely early 2022 Holiday Shipping Deadlines, especially with a sunday (no delivery!) Christmas this year. TLDR; Ship it by Saturday Dec. 17th
• Michael Steil at PageTable (legend... wait for it) gets to Dissecting a Dummy Promo MiniDisc, which we're always interested to see. We still convert Minidiscs for the world!
• NPR's Planet Money peels back the onion layers when they started a record label to learn about the music business, and opened our eyes as well!
• Andreas Fuhrich at Pilabor delves in the deep and dirty optical drive accuracy listing with ranked percentages by brand name/model 5" optical drives for more accurate (error proof?) Audio CD ripping! Why rely on a single drive? Another good reason to use our CD Ripping Service and DVD Ripping Service as we task multiple manufacturers drives on stubborn 5" optical media.
• On the copying theme, we offer this Public Service Announcement: Copying Is Not Theft [Embedded below]
• Greg Bjerg at Damn Interesting plays out The Tragic Birth of FM Radio and the tarnished history of it's inventor, Edwin Armstrong
• Michael Steil at PageTable (...dary contributor this month!) also steps us through Digitizing Analog Video through a Digital Camcorder - a handy trick I've used myself in the past for obsolete cameras!
• Matt Mills at ITIGIC reports on the first sign of the media wars stepping backwards with the stunning report that DVD Sales Surpass Blu-ray in 2021
• The MIT Press Reader delves into The Secret Life of Videocassettes in Iran and the informal video distribution infrastructure when their government banned all home video technology in 1983.
• Free Public Phones? Why not when all calls are basically free? Check out Philadelphia hacker consortium PhilTel's awesome pay phone experiment! I'll see how this story progresses with great interest!
• As someone who still deals with the USPS regularly, I've wondered how mail is delivered to Antarctica. (Is the answer very slowly?...) Read all about McMurdo Postal Mail and thank your Postman for their faithful (and regular) service!
• Imgur user LegbootLegit shares this 80's post of pictures of the Micro Piano Cassette Adapter - a hilarious tiny piano that uses a classic cassette deck as an Amplifier!
• You can insert Cassettes into Computers? Watch as YouTuber LGR Oddware reviews the the 5.25" PC Cassette Tape Deck! Plusdeck 2c [Embedded below]
• The Guardian adds to my evidence pile when a hundred UK companies sign up for four-day week with no loss of pay.
• The Conversation backs us up that a Four-day week trial confirms working less increases wellbeing and productivity
• Finally nailing the coffin nail on shorter workweeks, NPR's Planet Money (them again?) discovered these companies ran an experiment: Pay workers their full salary to work fewer days (I think you know how this ends!)

November 2022

• Billboard Magazine celebrates the CD's 40th birthday with a look back at The CD’s Rise in the Music Business: An Oral History
• DesignBoom showcases another imaginary product and wants to elevate your digital tunes with this vinyl-inspired 'retro player'.
• Remember Cabbage Patch Kids? This two-part local and national news stories first ran around Black Friday in 1983 when these dolls sold out immediately to crowds of collectors. [Embedded below]
• In search of a little analog audio tape cassette nostalgia? Plenty of classic blank brands that will remind you of your mix tape days.

• Got a Dirty Video? The Scotch Head Cleaning Tape solves all, 1987 pic.twitter.com/SgF4O8ZS1g

  — UKADS (@ukads3) October 16, 2022

• Good Times heads into the special section and uncovers Recording the Grateful Dead: The Culture of Tapers
• Canadian Conservation Institute does the deep dive on the Longevity of Recordable CDs, DVDs and Blu-rays. None of them seem destined for truly lifetime storage.
• TechMoan is back and does the full soup-to-nuts testing to see if you can demagnetize Compact Discs to improve the sound - TL;DW - No shocker, this device also does NOTHING! [Embedded below]
• Bartosz Ciechanowski teaches you everything you ever wanted to know about Sound in a excellent multimedia interactive lesson.
• Watch a lot of TV and Movies and want to read along? Browse Screenplays for Movies and TV Shows
• Gizmodo asks Is Every Website Playing Videos Violating the VPPA? (Video Privacy Protection Act)
• Jeff Geerling says it's Time to UNSUBSCRIBE from Netflix, Disney+ and run your own media server! [Embedded below]
• VICE points you to the New Tool Lets You Search Tons of Old CDs and Floppy Disks for Lost Media
• Computerworld says the four-day workweek works, and I'd agree they're right!

October 2022

• Happy 40th Birthday to the Compact Disc initially released in October 1982 to become a well beloved music format that's still in use today!
• R.I.P. NSB Radio.co.uk, which ceased broadcasting after 18+ years on Friday September 16th, where the Forum, Radio website, Archives and Slack were all turned off. They were my long-time favorite internet stream that I truly enjoyed and supported, and I thank them for the years of great breaks music.
• No Film School pleads This Is Why We Need to Return to Physical Media, especially with 'movie purchases' on streaming sites that go missing when the license expires.
• In the other-conversions-department, we stumbled across Floppy Disk.com, where you can buy (and sell) old floppy disks (3.5", 5", 8") - plus get data off old Floppies, Zip Disks and other long-dead computer media.
• Louder Sound shows us the world's first vinyl album that's also a guitar pedal. Comes with extra thick vinyl for strength!
• The resurgence of vinyl record players comes in waves, like this Hurricane Ian size swell: Acquire Mag covers the release of Ikea and Swedish House Mafia's launch of the Obegränsad Record Player
• Just in time for MusicRadar to show the IKEA KALLAX storage unit designed for DJing (also in conjunction with Swedish House Mafia)
• Teenage Engineering released the PO-80 Record Factory, a tiny hand-built undersized turntable that can also etch it's own dubplates/acetate masters.
• Yanko Design presents a gallery of images of a Vertical Turntable, that might not be a real product, yet...
• Wanna sound like Aphex Twin? How about some Free sound design software by Richard James aka Aphex Twin and Dave Griffiths?
• The easiest way to improve your speaker system is to Optimize the audio quality of loudspeakers by using the free HiFiScan (and a computer with a very good microphone).

September 2022

• Part-Time Audiophile helps announce the everything-old-is-new-again Technics SL-100C Direct-Drive Turntable a sleek new offering that looks exactly like it's SL-1200 inspiration.
• Nostalgia must run deep, as Nikkei Asia also sees Cassette player prices surge amid comeback
• Before you go converting Grandmom's 78rpm records, you might want to check the Internet Archive's extensive Geoffrey A. Wheeler 78rpm Collection for the singer or song first!
• In a huge scandal in the audio community, Mobile Fidelity Records has been using digital masters even though they sold their vinyl releases as analog tape remasters. The Washington Post [paywall] and Metal Injection both cover the deets.
• DW writer Silke Wünsch talks about 40 years of CDs: From listening pleasure to useless trash? and gripes about beloved albums ubiquity making them worthless today.
• TechMoan takes the hit and does the legwork of testing to see if you can Shave Compact Discs to improve the sound - TL;DW - it does NOTHING to improve the signal! [Embedded below]
• Slashdot confirms my bias and notes a UK Bank Says Four-Day Week Is The 'Future of Working Life'

August 2022

• Discogs shows 3 Trends That Prove CDs are Making a Comeback, although that graphic to the right seems to say otherwise)
• Music Radar interviews Ableton Live co-creator Robert Henke who says that it’s time to stop pressing vinyl and 'fully embrace CDs'. He's probably right, but don't tell T Bone Burnett and his new Ionic Originals!
• Binghamton News on the other hand, reports on how Researchers recycle CDs into flexible biosensors - a fascinating re-use!
• This hilarious two and a half minute newscast comes from down under, but the awful truth rings true even here: Mark Humphries presents the Awful News
• This Does Not Compute shows you the MiniDisc deck you hoped to never see - a courtroom recorder, with dual drives! [Embedded below]
• Hackaday reminds us all that Bluetooth 8-Track Adapters Are A Thing!. Well, until Lady Gaga releases an album on 8-Track, this might be your only choice for music in a car with an unremovable 8-Track player built-in.
• Have an insanely large music collection? Navidrome allows you to enjoy your music collection from anywhere, by making it available through a modern Web UI and through a wide range of third-party compatible mobile apps, for both iOS and Android devices.
• 41 Years Ago, on August 1, 1981, you might have seen The Very First Two Hours Of MTV - what a nostalgia trip, Mark Goodman looks young, and they kept in the ads!
• I don't want to make you suspicious, but your web browser is watching you, as you can tell by the Pointer Pointer
• CNN details how the world's biggest four-day workweek trial changed people's lives.

July 2022

• Becky Roberts at What Hi-Fi thinks Everyone is buying vinyl, but it isn't (and shouldn't be) the end for CD's!
• My favorite blog Hackaday is strong with the puns and asks Wooden you like to hear a CNC-Cut Phonograph? (Oak Course I do!)
• Spirograph Fun with Two Turntables!
• The Verge discovers that Metadata is the biggest little problem plaguing the music industry! Mis-labeled metadata in Music files are used as gospel, stealing money from rightful artists due to inept (lazy) data entry.
• Reddit User asivery posts a Web Minidisc Update: offering TOC Cloning and ATRAC download via USB on Type-S Sony NetMD portables! (This is about 25 years overdue!)
• Curbed throws a wrench in the back-to-office refrain with it's story: The 3-Day Return to Office Is, So Far, a Dud
• Glasgow Live reports on local efforts to mandate a four-day week on full pay!
• Jill Tichborne testifies at The Guardian that "I just moved to a four-day week, without losing any pay. It’s changed everything". Preach on, sister!

June 2022

• Consequence Sound uncovers the Story Behind the White House’s Secret Vinyl Collection - the Jimmy Carter era collection would probably have some classic disco!
• Watch out Crosley! (Makers of cheap suitcase turntables!) Engadget flips the story of IKEA teaming up with Swedish House Mafia for their own Turntable! (and DJ furniture to go with it!)
• My favorite blog Hackaday shows off how a Pitch Sequencer Turns Tascam Tape Deck Into Instrument. In this case, a Raspberry Pi Pico handles PWM control of a tape deck playing a monotone!
• Underjord makes the case of what ID3v2 could have been. (that's the format for metadata in your music files that stores album data like artist, album, art, composer)
• 9to5Mac pens the obituary for the iPod touch and 'iPod' brand are officially dead. iWonder do iDevices sound 'iDated' in 2022?
• Input Mag wants you to meet the amateur archivists streaming old VHS tapes online
• Comic Book Resources points out that the CGC Plans to Start Grading Your Vintage VHS Tapes (I have a slightly blemished shelf-boxed copy of Shrek worth tens of dollars, I'm sure!)
• Nieman Journalism Lab noted the BBC commissions a study to show what life without the BBC would be like, just in time for the BBC News to explain the BBC TV licence fee: What is it and why is it under threat? (Yes, they tax TV's in England!)
• Hackaday dimes out a hacker who discovered MiniDisc Player Supports Full Data Transfer - it's about 130mb uncompressed per disc. Yes, we convert Minidiscs but this is for some serious data recovery from Sony NetMD Devices.
• Nikkei Asia sadly announces that Classic Japanese audio brand Onkyo files for bankruptcy - we still use their USB Audio digitizers in our day to day business!
• Big short work week news from across the pond - CNN covers The world's biggest four-day work week pilot starts in the UK, and the The New York Times (paywall) jibes with Britain Tests a 4-Day Workweek.
• Beacon develops CRM software for Charities, and they are switching to a four-day work week. They explain why.

May 2022

• Pictured to the right, a bit of deception you might find inside of your full-sized SD Memory Cards - some of them are just secret readers for MicroSD Memory Cards inside!
• Tremblings and Warblings cleans up a very old 1860-era Phonautograph recording step by step in this multimedia history retelling of The Voice in the Soot: Humanity's Earliest Known Recording
• Speaking of dying formats, Damon Krukowski zooms out from the deluge of recent news stories and states There Is No CD Revival, pointing out the meager bump in sales is dwarfed by the true market leaders.
• In the probably-soon-to-be-dead format war, music producer T Bone Burnett announced a new analog disc medium for music he's developed called Ionic Originals - a new Music Medium Combining CD and Vinyl!. I give it six months!
• Brad Wheeler reports for The Globe and Mail how the music cassette tape revival is in full rewind mode, whose title belies the unintended truth: cassette sales are up in the UK!
• Andrew Simon at Lapham’s Quarterly uncovers the Egyptian Government plans to stop the lowly cassette tape in the 1980's by Seizing the Means of Audio Production
• Reddit User Semateos shows off his Arduino project of a mp3 player in a cassette. Yes, it also plays in a cassette player (sorta). (More details can be found in the Reddit comments...)
• Stuart Brand shows the inner workings of his case hack of putting an entire Raspberry Pi computer inside the body of a cassette at Yanko Design.
• Adam Met writes for Rolling Stone (seller of billions of pounds of newsprint) and makes the weak excuse to Save the Planet: Stop Streaming Songs (TLDR: Download them instead to save the greenhouse gases used to facilitate networks!)
• From the bandwidth-abuse-department, Daniel Aleksandersen evidences the 0.5 MB of nothing in all Apple Music files on his Ctrl.blog (TLDR: adding metadata adds 'data' to file sizes, and that data is sometimes larger than you expected when it comes to blocks of data on a partitioned hard drive.)
• Speaking of downloading audio, I just found this GitHub Repository for Shine - a super fast fixed-point MP3 encoder. It may be very useful if you're doing huge library encodes to increase output speed on many CPU's, including Raspberry Pi's!
• Andrew Heinzman over at Review Geek explains why I Hate Bluetooth Audio. His four reasons will make you seriously consider wired headphones next opportunity.
• Lary Wallace answers the question of the ages in this Aeon Essay: Why do your musical tastes get frozen over in your twenties? I remember the struggle to stay musically informed, and now can't possibly care about any new artists due to my encyclopedic knowledge of older (better) music.
• Why I'm Not An Artist peels back the mystery of the 'VCR Virus' Fake VHS Copy-Protection Warning Label from a 1991 Videotape to thwart casual copying.

April 2022

It's Earth Day on April 22nd this year, and one of the ways our small company makes Earth-friendly decisions is our support and use of The CD and DVD Recycling Center of America, where we send all of our bad 5" optical media since we found them in 2006. Unfortunately, they've been closed due to Covid since March 2020, and they have recently launched a GoFundMe Campaign to raise money for reopening. We're on board, and hope our loyal readers will contribute as well, and make the small effort to keep un-recycleable media like this out of the trash system. People who donate to this fundraiser will get first opportunity to send in CD's for recycling!

• Gawker's Nicholas Russell hums along to Let’s Get Physical as he sings the praises of owning physical media like CD's and Vinyl Records in this stream-everything age.
• Murray, a blogger from Australia, pitches the Reliability of Optical Disks and does some at-home field testing to determine best storage conditions. He only confirms our own findings when it comes to reliability of Optical over Magnetic storage.
• Here's an odd museum you can visit right now: Museum of Endangered Sounds (Headphones suggested - turn them all on to hear my latest industrial music album!)
• In this odd but true tweet from BFSkinnerstan, it looks like a dead band was reanimated to wander around the country playing the music of The Zombies...

  In the late 60s, The Zombies already had disbanded by the time their music became popular in the US, so a company hired a couple fake bands to travel the country pretending to be The Zombies. One of those bands eventually became ZZ Top

  — Jacob the Eternal Rob Refsnyder Fan (@BFSkinnerstan) March 21, 2022

• Charlie Warzel writes for the 'Galaxy Brain' newsletter of The Atlantic and regales us with his Confessions of a Digital Hoarder, and how you never use your memories when a scrollable feed of photos is always available. An interesting read, and a compelling author to follow!
• One of my favorite blogs: Hackaday delves deep and discovers A MiniDisc Optical Head Has A Few Surprises Up Its Sleeve. Yes, we convert Minidiscs and were surprised at the advanced tech in the diminutive cases!
• Always on the lookout for free audio software (Audacity is still my favorite), we stumbled across a new entry in the DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) category: Zrythm - Digital Audio Workstation, which uses an interesting free/purchase/subscribe model.
• Mashable laments that YouTube added 1,500 'free' movies, but good luck finding them!
• YouTuber The Slow Mo Guys shoots 140,000 frames a second video to show you How a cathode ray tube TV Works in Slow Motion [Embedded below]
• Delivered with a British accent, BBC Worklife uncovers the realities of the four-day workweek and how shorter hours does not mean less work.

March 2022

• Axios spots the trend: CD sales grow for first time since 2004
• SPIN Magazine profiles Val Shively at R&B Records in Upper Darby with the story of The Vinyl Countdown. If you need a 45rpm 7" disc, Val has it.
• Suzanne Humphries over at Review Geek claims I Swapped Spotify for Vinyl and It Changed My Life. (TLDR: She listened to whole album sides!)
• Rupert Morrison disses the upcoming 'Record Store Day' (April 22, 2022) on The Guardian: Record Store Day is harming, not helping, independent music shops like mine
• YouTuber Half as Interesting avoids law-break while telling you Why This Sound is Illegal to Play! (embedded below - feel free to listen only (it's endless stock footage), and stop at 5:32 when it converts to a promotion)
• David L. Farquhar at The Silicon Underground asks (un-ironically) How much did VHS tapes cost in the 80s?
• Sid Bala breaks it down into bite sized chunks of why H.264 is magic: a technical walkthrough of a remarkable technology. A detailed breakdown of the many layers of encoding and compression at hand with modern video codecs.
• Need to do some odd video encoding? Ahmad Awais gives you his copy and paste Command Line Audio Video Workflows with FFmpeg. GIF Conversion, Video Rotation, Video Merge, the list goes on!
• The Washington Post [Paywall] finds another short work week ally with 'Homeworld' and 'Hardspace: Shipbreaker' video game developer Blackbird Interactive embraces four-day workweek (Need a 12ft Ladder?)
• WIRED simply thinks I'm wrong: The 4-Day Week Is Flawed. Workers Still Want It

February 2022

• Check out this one minute (over-cropped) video on Imgur of how 'specialized color' vinyl records are individually made by hand.
• Imgur user Bibbledoopgobblepatch shows how to have fun with Canadian money by using the plastic edge of a crisp Loonie, he can preview the audio on vinyl records!
• NME drops the bombshell we should have seen coming: Vinyl albums outsold CDs in US for first time in 30 years in 2021
• Ted Gioia asks Is Old Music Killing New Music?. It's an interesting (and longer) read on what the music market really sells.
• The Yale Review rallies Against the Stream (a nostalgic analog media rewind by author Jason Guriel)
• Cinemassacre lovingly reminisces with VHS Memories and What Nostalgia Means to Me (embedded below)
• Speaking of nostalgia, MEL Magazine reveals The Hilarious Uselessness of Those Old DVD Anti-Piracy Ads (You wouldn’t steal a car! But you might download one that is open source. Really though - Don't Copy That Floppy!)
• Fast Company reports on fintech firm Bolt is permanently embracing a 4-day workweek, and Bolt confirmed it on their own site.
• Gizmodo joins the chorus with the news that Panasonic to Offer Four-Day Workweek in Japan.
• The New York Times (paywall) reaffirms our confirmation bias of removing our phone number when they report that now Restaurants Ditch Phone Lines, Making Employees’ Lives Easier

January 2022

• It's a new year, might as well check your status on the National Do Not Call Registry and thwart another year of spam calls and robocalls from shady solicitors. Alas, if only I could escape the amber alerts and texts from my city representatives!
• Sticking with our 'New Year' theme, the The Public Domain Review generates the list of All Sound Recordings Prior to 1923 That Will Enter the US Public Domain in 2022.
• Katie Edwards at the Independent lashes out with her story: Vinyl sales are at a high – but owning records is a pointless endeavour. (She's a digital convert from the UK who'd rather pay Spotify than own)
• HomeHack suggests the opposite, and thinks you should create your own music library and use the free and open source MusicBrainz Picard. It adds important and detailed metadata to digital files automatically, without you having to retype liner notes.
• Lighterra makes some strong suggestions for its Video Encoding Settings for H.264 Excellence. Good starting point if you're digitizing your own video collections, but aimed at VOD providers who might switch resolutions mid-stream to solve bandwidth issues.
• Engadget blows the dust off the tape heads with this report that Tascam is making brand new cassettes for its ancient four-track recorders. Folks ♥ that analog sound, it seems...
• Composer Magazine profiles Geoff Foster on the art of (audio studio) engineering, a detailed look at a famed UK-based recording studio and how it operates.
• Admittedly off topic, but worthwhile: Got a sheet of paper nearby? Make a variety of paper airplanes quickly with this website!
• Oddly, Bloomberg covers the work-week reshuffle going on as the United Arab Emerites (UAE) Moves Weekend Days to Saturday-Sunday, Makes Friday a Half-Day.

December 2021

• Just In Time for Christmas - the list of Mailable Live Animals!. With the well-documented delays in the post office, I'd act quickly and get your Scorpions in the mail this week!
• Variety shows the first side effect of an undersupplied system: Adele’s ’30’ Sends Vinyl Pressing Plants Into Overdrive, While LP Shortages Leave Many Artists Chasing Pavements
• Audioholics proposes the question: Stereo Gear in the 1970’s Was it The Audiophile Golden Age?
• Since we retired from video conversions, it seems my confirmation bias was on full alert: Leolabs.org details Capturing and Archiving MiniDV Tapes on macOS, and Arsouyes.org shows you how to Digitize MiniDV tapes with Linux!. I guess Window's users will have to figure it out on their own....
• Tom's Hardware shows you what will replace your DVD's and BluRay discs soon with a New 5D Storage to Offer 10,000x the Density of Blu-Ray
• The rise of I Want That on a T-Shirt - Gizmodo's Tom McKay reports how Artists Are Pissing Off Disney’s Copyright Gods to Fight the Scourge of Bots Stealing Their Work
• The New York Times [Paywall] asks Is the Four-Day Workweek Finally Within Our Grasp?

November 2021

This month, as we celebrate National Recycling Day on Nov. 15th, I'd like to talk a little bit about our company's efforts to lowering our global environmental footprint through our select choices. While I understand our main product (Compact Discs) are environmental nightmares when it comes to recycling, we're adamant about using better materials, like our Vinyl Collector's Edition CD/DVD Cases. I abhor traditional jewelcases (pictured to the above left) for their environmental cost: They have three different parts, and use two types of plastic; neither which has a popular recycling route. They shatter easily (3 different parts to break - any one part breaks makes the entire package worthless), and generally cost more than the contents (artwork and CD), without adding any value - only bulk and conformity.

The jewelcases we include with our Vinyl Collector's Edition conversions are 100% recyclable, have no separate parts (plastic sheet cover is fused to the soft case), and they survive USPS shipping way better than traditional cases. They also allow for larger, double-sided color artwork prints that would otherwise not fit or be seen in a traditional case. They're the same height as traditional cases, and due to their thinner profile, you can fit more CD's on a shelf. Alas, the cases are shallower, but that's due to the fact that 10% of the depth of a traditional CD case is for the oversize hinge!

As for our 'Compact Disc' problem, we have been heartily suggesting our customers consider digital-only delivery of all audio conversion collections (especially with the popularity of home media servers becoming the norm) while we patiently wait for our favorite CD Recycling plant to re-open!

• VICE's Jesse Bernard waxes enthusiastically How Record Collecting Became My Family Tradition
• Liz Ohanesian explains her love of shopping for music in person on Shondaland's Why I Still Dig for Vinyl in Record Stores
• Rob Walling announced the RIAA sales trends on Twitter that we all saw coming: Vinyl records are now outselling CDs. (although his annoyingly titled slide uses the dreaded non-word 'Vinyls')
• What happens when you play Dolly Parton's classic "Jolene" at the wrong turntable speed? Imgur has the answer in this short video (...and it's hauntingly beautiful!)
• What's it cost to make an album? Dangerous Minds has a scan of The Rolling Stones’ studio receipt for recording ‘Wild Horses’ and ‘Brown Sugar’ (TLDR; About a grand for studio time and tape!)
• Hackaday brings the pun when they say There’s Not A Cassingle Thing Missing From This Cassette Deck Masterclass which points us to this Instructables Intro to Cassette Recorder Operation, Maintenance, and Repair (with Pictures)
• The New York Times Wirecutter bites L.L. Cool J and disses the media (type): Don’t Call It a Comeback: Cassettes Have Sounded Lousy for Years (And Still Do!) [Paywall]
• Hackaday scares up a report on bringing back the dead with Audio Tape Interface Revives Microcassettes As Storage Medium. Talk about byte-sized storage! At heart, it's an Arduino Nano, which reads out the data stream at about 3000 baud!
• The Verge warns that Kids who grew up with search engines could change education forever. Turns out no one taught them the idea of file & folder hierarchy in computers!
• Lifehacker helps you prep for the Black Friday Apocalypse, and How to Plan for Slower, More Expensive Mail Service This Holiday Season
• Slate's Mary Wilson talks to Jacob Bogage about the U.S. Postal Service mail slowdowns and controversy: What the fight is really about.

October 2021

• New Statesman reports on the "unmanageable" delays at record pressing plants due to supply, demand, and Covid.
• Archive.org (part of the Internet Archive) allows you to Search and Stream Selections from the 78rpm Vinyl Collection online (We also convert 78rpm's with similar [if not better] sound fidelity!)
• Hackaday thinks that the VinyGo Stereo Vinyl Recorder Will Put You In The Groove
• Techmoan (a frequent contributor) reviews the 21st century 'Sound Burger' - the Coturn CT-01, a new Kickstarter portable turntable now in production.
• If you're old enough, you probably owned a Walkman which played compact cassettes (mine was a Sport model and yellow!) Find yours on the The Walkman Archive - The resource for tape walkmans!
• Boing Boing covers the resurgence of "Free Blockbuster" boxes that let you drop off, or take, a VHS movie. Is one close to you? Here's the map - there's ten in Philadelphia alone!
• Gizmodo breaks how Apple Music Will Use Shazam to Get Everyone Paid for DJ Mixes (Effectively monetizing DJ mixes for featured musicians and not DJ's!)
• Somewhat on the bleeding edge, check out Ozzillate a website that allows you to transfer Files via Sound ID! Anonymous, accountless, and distributed to large groups at the same time are only some of the benefits.
• Spotify Engineering just announced the release of Pedalboard: Spotify’s Audio Effects Library for Python. If you code and deal with audio, this library should make adding audio effects easy!
• Jacobin Magazine thinks We Need a Shorter Workweek to Free Us From the Tyranny of Work
• WIRED UK has the opinion that Scotland’s four-day week trial is fatally flawed.

September 2021

We retired our video conversion services this last month, after 16 years of converting home videos of Christmas presents being opened and Disneyworld trips. Our statement on our websites sums up our reasons why, and our focus on audio conversions only. We're also letting a few domains lapse, and have rolled those audio conversion services into our main website.

• Vivienne (as thumbnailed above and to the right) helps her daughter with identifying an ancient artifact...
• We recently stumbled across TapeDeck.org with a treasure trove of analog audio tape cassette nostalgia! You can search by color!
• Phoenix New Times digs up Al Jaffee's Ghost to answer Snappy Answers to All Your Record-Collecting Questions
• Martin Belam goes over the nefarious Copy-protection for vinyl in the 1970's in this 2008 article.
• SPIN says Long Live Vinyl, which is odd coming from a print magazine relegated to internet publishing.
• John Staton at Wilmington StarNews gives us the long play: School Kids Records returns to Wilmington amid vinyl boom.
• Dangerous Minds talks the talk about Extreme Record Collecting part II: There’s only one way to find Better Records
• Independent Premium Long Reads gets into the groove: Why the demand for vinyl LPs is outstripping supply. [Paywall?]
• Norman Lebrecht at Slipped Disc asks Are your CDs losing tone as they sit upon your shelf?
• Another bad day for internet TV as Ars Technica reports on Locast’s free TV service shut down after losing copyright ruling.
• I'm envious of the sheer effort to collect the featured tech at LabGuy's World: Museum of Extinct Video Recorders and Accessories
• foone on Twitter gives the history of a TV with a Cartrivision player built into it
• Rob Thubron at TechSpot covers a recycling miracle when a VHS store owner drives 600 miles to rescue 20,000 tapes destined for landfill.
• Guangyi Li makes a social statement about How I Experience the Web Today - the sum of all annoying web behaviors!
• BBC Worklife confirms our choices when they make the case for a shorter workweek!

August 2021

We miss meeting our customers in person when they dropped off their items for conversion and they'd regale us with stories about the history of the album/tape they were dropping off. Recent customer Dwight Schultz included a note with his 1970's-era vinyl to CD conversion that detailed the comings and goings of band members in rock bands, and his fond memories of live shows. Click the thumbnail to the right to see his letter about this long forgotten 'Manna' debut LP!

• CNBC reports that Music fans pushed sales of vinyl albums higher in first half of 2021. Good news for vinyl!
• Pitchfork asks Why Are Independent Artists and Labels Turning Away From Vinyl? (Well... keep reading)
• Investment Monitor shows the impact of the vinyl production crisis (and Covid-19) on indie artists. Bad news for vinyl?
• Pitchfork reminds us of another shortcoming of vinyl with their story on Indie Labels Address Vinyl Warping Due to U.S. Heat Waves.
• Richard Metzger at Dangerous Minds talks at length about his Extreme Record Collecting: Confessions of an analog vinyl snob
• The Guardian rolls out the nostalgia with it's introspection of the curious history of video games on vinyl - flexidiscs with modem recordings that allowed you to load apps onto your ZX Spectrum.
• End of an Era! Local hanger-on Viva Video "The Last Picture Store" in Ardmore is sadly closing at the end of this month. They've posted their goodbye, as well as their schedule for movie nights for the remainder of the summer!
• Speaking of local hangers-on, Drexel University’s free format, non-commercial radio WKDU celebrates it's 50th Anniversary back in July! Still available over-the-air at 91.7 FM, they've been a great community resource for Philadelphia since the early 70's! Congratulations!
• Hackaday's Jenny List memorializes the End Of An Era: NTSC Finally Goes Dark In America on July 13 of 2021, the last few remaining NTSC transmitters in the USA finally came off air. No more analog broadcasting for you!
• Chris Brown over at Tempus-Ex gets into the nitty gritty of what video codecs are, and how to make one with his (highly technical) but innocently named tutorial: Hello, Video Codec!
• Kyle Rankin over at Purism predicts The Future of Computers: The Neighborhood and The Nursing Home - it's a thinly veiled 'right to repair' manifesto, but he's right!
• Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga recently used his position to promote the Four-Day Working Week to Boost Productivity.
• The country of Iceland had given the four day week a trial as well. The Independent declared it an ‘overwhelming success’; Quartz at Work reports that it 'bodes well for productivity'; but The Conversation suggests the success... has been greatly overstated. Lots of takes on this step forward for workers rights!

July 2021

We'll start this month's post with a joke: As as professional sound technician and editor, I have many friends who are in similar careers; I have a Russian friend who’s a sound engineer. And a Czech one too, and a Czech one too. (Drops Microphone)

• Blogger Sophie Haskins shows the example output of an Oscilloscope on a typical NTSC video signal (seen just above to the right). By moving the slider, you can look at the trace of each video line in this enlightening web demo.
• Pitchfork reports that New Jersey’s famous punk and metal store Vintage Vinyl is sadly closing permanently! You have until the end of July to buy from Vintage Vinyl directly!
• Which is odd that AP News reports that Vinyl records surge during pandemic, keeping sales spinning!
• YouTuber Fran Blanche goes in depth down why she claims a plastic battery powered turntable as 'My Dream Turntable!!!' [Link 30'05 RT]
• In this blast from 2008, Stereophile.com advocates for better sound quality in their post MP3 vs AAC vs FLAC vs CD
• IEEE Spectrum makes the case of Why the Future of Data Storage is (Still) Magnetic Tape. With the amount of data being recorded is increasing at 30 to 40 percent per year, throwing more hard drives at the problem is not always the solution.
• YouTuber This Does Not Compute commiserates Sony MiniDisc: The (Not) Forgotten Audio Format That (Never) Failed [Link 38'48 RT] (Yes, we convert those too!)

Wha? We found more news about shorter workweeks and
working from home becoming the norm post-pandemic!

• Quartz at Work thinks The four-day work week is finally catching on! (Kickstarter is one example, we're another)
• Bloomberg interviews Nicholas Bloom from Stanford University who predicts Americans Are Done With 5-Days a Week in the Office, and here’s What That Means for the Economy...
• The Mainichi (Japan's National Daily) follows the story on Japan gov't backs 4-day workweek, but experts split
• CityAM (UK) survey's tech professionals on their return to the office. 86% say "No thanks"

June 2021

• Pictured to the right, Jarmo Niinisalo reveals the elusive 'Aphex Face' hidden in a music track with a visualization of the digital audio in a logarithmic frequency scale! There's pictures in that song!
• National Public Radio (NPR) puts your ears to the test with multiple choice questions to see How Well Can You Hear Audio Quality?
• I can speak from years of experience, but Discogs reveals the True Colors: What You Should Know About Black vs. Color Vinyl. While prettier, and often with higher resale value, non-black vinyl is generally terrible for sound quality. Don't even get me started on picture discs!
• AJ Wykes at SoundGuys asks Is vinyl better than streaming? and doesn't come up with definitive answer...
• Lauryn Schaffner at Loudwire covers this heartwarming letter that was included with a used vinyl sale, that detailed it's rich history.
• IOL in South Africa alerts us to the resurgence of Cassettes Tape music releases.
• While I understand our main product (CD & DVD's) are environmental nightmares when it comes to recycling, National Public Radio (NPR) examines American habits, and tries to determine Is Recycling Worth It Anymore? The Truth Is Complicated. [Link]
• Another flare-up of our confirmation bias: Jack Kelly at Forbes predicts The Future Of Work Will Be Five-Hour Days, A Four-Day Workweek And Flexible Staggered Schedules. Not only do I agree, I already practice it! (Well, I work 6 hour days...)
• CNN covers the World Health Organization (WHO) report that Long working hours are killing hundreds of thousands of people a year. Another vote for shorter work weeks - healthier world!
• Zoe Kleinman at BBC News reports on how reduced hours at Microsoft Japan 'boosts productivity' I can attest - less hours to work, get more done with those hours!
• This might be slightly off-topic, but I found it enlightening! Edward Ongweso, Jr., technology reporter at VICE News, explains for The Gravel Institute how Uber is scamming you! [Link]

May 2021

We've recently updated our Covid-19 Statement for 2021, mostly to get rid of references to our August move from last year. What's changed? Nothing. I agree with the New York Times in that the indifferent public (who seems afraid to get a second vaccine dose) will forever postpone the 'Herd Immunity' we require to make Covid-19 go away forever. Hence, all conversion jobs must be shipped in and out of our offices. No dropoffs, no pickups! (Please stop sending emails asking if you can!)

• First, a few tips for sounding good in this day of Zoom Meetings: Ariyh makes the case that high quality audio makes you sound smarter!
• That must be what they use over at NPR, as Current interviews their top audio engineer and he explains their signature sound - a crisp, bright tone that comes from a particular microphone — and a few other elements!
• Adam Savage and I agree in our general hated of Duct Tape. Someone had the gaul to ask him about it, and he explains "Why I Actually Hate Duct Tape" in under 8 minutes on YouTube. [Link]
• Michael Thomas Connolly makes a very long and detailed case defending Digital Audio over Vinyl in his Audio Professional's Take on Vinyl.
• NME reports on another side-effect of vinyl's surging popularity: A new vinyl pressing plant in Middlesbrough (UK)!
• Caron McBride of Oklahoma should have used our VHS to DVD Conversion service to backup her 'borrowed' copy of 'Sabrina the Teenage Witch' on VHS tape in 1999. Well, officially, we opened in 2005, but returning it only 6 years late would have saved her the eventual felony charges for not returning the VHS tape 21 years ago! Local Fox News KOKH reports.
• Boston's PBS station GBH News puts the USPS to the test with 100 Mailed Letters. They Did Not Get Speedy Delivery...
• Stefano Brilli helps you use your old NetMD Minidisc device again using your web browser with his (free!) Web MiniDisc Application
• Just dipping your toes into Audio editing? Check out Reaper - a Digital Audio Workstation for Production Without Limits. Coded by a single developer, it's worth checking out!
• Vitling has put his algorithmic music experiment online where you can experience The Endless Acid Banger

March/April 2021

We'll start this booming bi-monthly blog update with a joke: Someone had submitted a vinyl LP to be converted to our Vinyl To CD conversion service, and when it arrived, it was called 'Sounds Wasps Make'. Intrigued by the title, I gave it a listen while it was playing on my record player; It didn't sound anything like wasps - then I realized I was playing the Bee side...

• This project is hard to beat! Watch as Imgur user Vinnykeogh turns his Old Drum into fully working Record Player!
• Discogs profiles record label Night Dreamer, the Direct-to-Disc Vinyl Recording Specialists - the album is recorded directly to acetate masters, no digital backups!
• Wanna hear some truly classic vinyl? Peruse the vast library of The Great 78 Project at Internet Archive for free Downloads and Streaming!
• Jem Aswad over at Variety is Learning to Be OK With the Word ‘Vinyls’. Alas, Arthur Kovacs at Mixmag Asia is right: the plural of vinyl is vinyl.
• Wanna listen to that 12" Vinyl Album in your car? (You don't!) AutoEvolution details the Highway Hi-Fi, the Revolutionary 1950's Vinyl-In-Your-Car Tech That Failed!
• Discogs goes down the rabbit hole to list 10 Albums That Explore the Multisided Record Phenomenon - Albums that cut two (or more) grooves into one side of a record!
• Jerry Del Colliano admits to his audio medium rejection in Why I Sold A Significant Classic Rock Vinyl Collection In 2008 and Never Looked Back on Audioholics
• Sad news this month as they announced the Inventor of compact cassette tape Lou Ottens passed away
• Jeffrey Lee Puckett at Discogs pays tribute to Mr. Ottens passing with his essay Mixtapes Are the Original Playlists
• Alternatively, good news as National Audio Company in Springfield sees sales rise for cassette tapes! They produce 95% of cassette tapes in the western hemisphere!
• Iain Taylor for Salon Magazine answers why Audio cassettes sales have doubled during the pandemic...
• Dan DeLuca at the Philadelphia Inquirer states unequivocally: Move over, vinyl. Cassette tapes are the new old thing to love.
• South China Morning Post [paywall] profiles Dreams Chow Yin-chi, a Hong Kong collector fueling the revival of the Classic Boom Box
• Hackaday (linked) us to these detailed instructions on Building a LED Cassette Lamp!
• Hannah Selinger at The New York Times asks and answers the simple question: Who Is Still Buying VHS Tapes? Turns out VHS Tapes Are Worth Money!
• Vice Magazine breaks down analog video broadcast technology and why channel 37 has always been static.
• Antony Terence at UX Collective makes a good case why Instagram can't touch the visual glory of blank VHS tapes!
• YouTuber Espen Kraft explains Why shoot video on VHS, in 2021 in under 7 minutes. [Link]
• Two inventions, same purpose: Andy at British Ideas details the full breakdown of his 2013 Jack the Ripper Bot, while Dave Dunfield shows his 2017 Robotic DVD loader. Both fascinating breakdowns of engineering the automation of moving 5" optical media!
• The Guardian reports on the forward-thinking country of Spain to launch trial of four-day working week! The Spanish government agrees to proposal from leftwing party Más País allowing companies to test reduced hours - just like me!

February 2021

• Why is your package still in transit? Hundreds of thousands of items sent in late November and early December are sitting at the bottom of massive piles of delayed mail that continue to grow with new packages daily. We just had a package delivered to a customer after 68 days in transit - a new record! The Inquirer has the full details of the USPS Philadelphia Distribution Center's woes. (paywall)
• In another testament to the power of vinyl nostalgia, The Vinyl Factory lists the best selling vinyl of 2020 in the United Kingdom!
• Filmmaker Jed I. Rosenberg directed a documentary called “System Shock” which provides an intriguing and insightful overview of how the MP3 file disrupted the music industry. [Link]
• Speaking of nostalgia, Go back to the 1990's via this nostalgic TV simulator and relive the original ads, music videos, movie trailers, shows and more!
• In cassette tape news, NME reports cassette sales have more than doubled in 2020 with a 103% increase in sales.
• JapanToday notes the curious case of very high prices for Metal (Type IV) cassette tapes in Japan!
• Hackaday details how contributor Frank built a working cassette made (almost) entirely of wood! Good looking result! Wonder if there's some Woody Guthrie on the tape?
• You know, all you need is a web browser to make drum loops! Check out drumbit, an online drum machine!. Take a break from your next Zoom meeting, and make some dope beats!

January 2021

• Click the image to the right to see the high-resolution image of a highly accurate VHS Tape 'They don't know' Meme that really hits the nail on the head!
• Mark Davis collected the in-store cassette music for K-Mart back in the 1980's and 90's, and made them available to you in his nostalgic shopping mall audio collection: Attention K-Mart Shoppers
• Experience the worst album covers ever! at the accurately named (but painfully small) Museum of Bad Album Covers
• The New York Times chief classical music critic Anthony Tommasini declares 'No, I Am Not Getting Rid of My Thousands of CDs'... Long Live Compact Discs!
• Billboard reports Holiday Shopping Sends Vinyl Album Sales Soaring to Another Record Week! Long Live Vinyl Records!
• Fujifilm (via PetaPixel) has announced that it has set a new world record by creating a magnetic storage tape that can store a staggering 580 terabytes of data. Long Live Magnetic Tape!
• Hackaday shows us how to re-use those old VHS tapes in our brand new 3D Printer using VHS Tape Filament! Long Live Magnetic Tape Again!
• Taking Reel Tape to a new musical level, watch this Japanese Tape Pull-out Ensemble create music with three reel-to-reel decks and a big room! [Link]
• Hackaday alerted us to this cassette player turned synthesizer, Mellotron - DIY Cassette Synth Plays With Speed Control
• Want to figure out how sites like YouTube operate? Check out How video works, an informational site that breaks down the technologies at use, with new content still being added.
• Have your own legacy video footage you want to edit with the entire family? We just found you can Record, edit, mix, collaborate, and master your audio and video with Descript. It has built-in transcription, which is a major benefit for finding personal histories in long video segments!
• A technical breakdown with code, audio samples, and timelines blogger Paddlesteamer details Experimenting On My Hearing Loss. This very detailed report has ways to check your own, and warnings about not having animals in the room when playing back some of the high-frequency tones!
• BBC News backs up our own findings on the subject with their report: Four-day week means 'I don't waste holidays on chores'

December 2020

We'd recently received this lovely letter (pictured to the right) from customer Wendy Musselman detailing an all-too familiar story of the memories brought back by classic holiday albums. We got her conversion back to her in plenty of time for Christmas morning 2020! Get your Holiday Albums converted to CD or MP3 now just in time for the Holidays!

• Speaking of the holidays, are you feeling generous (or want to spread some joy), why not adopt a letter from Santa and send a gift to a child! Participate in USPS Operation Santa. Pick your own letter and send an anonymous gift (from Santa!) starting this Friday, Dec. 4th! Warm feelings are guaranteed!
• We love and rely heavily on the US Postal Service for all our shipping, even though they warn us of Pandemic delays on most shipments! We've seen some of the longest delivery times in the last 6 months, but we still track every outgoing package, and haven't lost one to date!
• It's time for the holidays and what better way to share love and memories with your family than to create an old-school, vintage movie? OTTVerse shows you how to turn brand new video footage into vintage film look with FFMpeg and the command line.
• Speaking of vintage footage, we're sorry to report that it's true: Philly Loves to Throw Snowballs at Santa! Admittedly, this was over 50 years ago, but Snopes checks it out and verifies our bad reputation.
• Back in October, we found a computer program on a vinyl record, now, we present the challenge of Booting DOS from a vinyl record!. You have to wonder what a scratch on the record produces...
• We get lots of emails about obsolete physical media formats and the type of content on them. Now, we forward them to Museum of Obsolete Media, with pictures and timelines attached to all sorts of media, including dozens of different 5" plastic media types besides the 2 we provide (CD & DVD)!
• Frustrated by Google's recent announcement that they'll start charging for Google Photo storage? Android Central shows you how to export your photos from Google Photos. I did it, and it was nearly 8gb of photos from 2015-2020!
• Our friends over at Lifehacker give you good reasons why to Recycle Your Old VHS Tapes, as they cannot be put in your recycle bin and be effectively recycled.
• Digitizing your old Videos stops Generation Loss - the artifact that a copy of a copy is only getting worse with each additional copy. The same thing happens with images and re-saving them again and again. The video below shows 1000 generations using four image compression algorithms: JPEG, WebP, JPEG XL, AVIF. The results are astounding, and the clear winner is obvious!
• Reason Foundation makes the pitch that expanded digital services are necessary during the pandemic in their essay COVID-19 Has Further Exposed the Need for Government to Digitize. As a provider of this type of service, I can't agree more!
• We speak often (and practice in our own business) about the benefits of a four-day work week. The Guardian has reports on a study that found lower stress levels for workers, but no cut in output, as well as a report that European politicians are saying Time has come for four-day week!
• There's something about New Zealand - outside of completely getting rid of the Coronavirus, now international firm Unilever is going to to try out four-day working week in New Zealand! Reuters has the story.

November 2020

It's Election Day as I write and update this, and I can say that I have no idea how it's gonna go. I look forward to the immediate disappearance of the endless stream of political commercials! Our links are a bit more technical this month...

• GearNews takes us on a nostalgia trip and shows the classic Casio EG-5 Guitar with a built-in Cassette Player! Built-in Accompaniment!
• The Ivory Tower throws down the gauntlet and asks: Why Do Records Sound Better? It's not a discussion, if you ask me, but he details the many steps that go from studio to vinyl, while championing the 'warmth' of vinyl.
• Found on GitHub: The swiss army knife of lossless video/audio editing LosslessCut - Free software to prevent adding video generation loss by re-encoding!
• OTTVerse details three Efficient Techniques for generating Frame-Accurate Thumbnails & Screenshots using FFmpeg on your MP4 video files for reference. Excellent tips if you have some command-line skills and a large video library of unknown content.
• Matthew Ball suggests that there's an Opportunity for Audio Sales, and Wonders Who Will Capture that market.. It's a pretty long, detailed breakdown of the successes of different audio sales funnels rise and fall over time. Definitely an opinion piece!

October 2020

• Synthtopia covers the weird transition of the lowly Compact Disc as Vinyl outsells it again for the first time in 3 decades. To be clear: neither is expected to be a 'relevant' audio distribution device again.
• The Philadelphia Inquirer (paywall) covers the USPS issues with local post offices due to new leadership mistakes.
• This local news story from Fox 17 details a 100-year postcard that was found and delivered (Finally!) Better late than never, but I imagine the addressee is long gone.
• Pop Culture Retrorama was digging deep in the crates to find this Commodore 64 Program on a 1984 Record Album!
• TreeHugger asks: Is It Time To Downsize My Record Collection?
• SoundGuys answer the question - Vinyl: Is it better than streaming or should we stay digital?
• Wow! - check out what this Neural Network can do to Old Videos! [Link]
• Engadget reports on Samsung Blu-ray players getting caught in loops that render them inoperable.
• From the Forgotten Media Dept: Hackaday covers how Sean Haas managed to squeeze a 45 Minute Podcast On A Floppy Disk
• Don't Copy That Floppy! Terence Eden shows his latest mash-up of old and new: A floppy-disk Walkman – using a Raspberry Pi
• YouTuber TechMoan takes a 16-minute look at the short-lived D-Theater Format which offered HD movies on VHS with captured D-VHS Demo Tape showing New York in 1993! [Link]
• We stumbled across this new service that allows you to create text files from your MP3s - audio transcription, done online, and no account required! Might be useful for some of our customers with long tape-recorded conversations!
• Confirmation bias has led us to discover another listicle with companies choosing to work shorter weeks, just like our own 4-day schedule.

August 2020

We've finally finished our move, and are full-time in our new offices in West Philadelphia. Shipments have been arriving at our new address with some regularity, and we're even getting orders with our new updated order form. We've got a lot of new stories this month, after taking off last month to plan the move.

• A couple months ago, we linked to the Internet Archive's trove of MTV footage. Alas, a copyright takedown request from MTV's parent company removed it all before anyone could enjoy their nostalgia trip. VICE has the story.
• We still ♥ the Internet Archive, however. Have you heard of The Great 78 Project – Community Preservation, Research, Discovery of 78rpm Records?
• Project C-90 is an attempt to catalog and scan all brand-name compact cassettes as released from 1964 on.
• TechRadar postulates how a 2020 upgrade of the cassette tape might pan out, mostly due to the success of Nostalgia marketing. (like Guardians of the Galaxy)
• Discogs covers the obvious for those new adopters: How To Care For Cassette Tapes
• Jalopnik has an embedded video from a 1971 episode of the BBC television show Tomorrow’s World that features a Cassette Tape-Based Navigation System that's Kind Of Brilliant
• Terence Eden deconstructs a very inexpensive £30 record player on his blog. Very technical, and interestingly cheap!
• YouTuber Reel Engineering has a 14 minute video on The Truth About Vinyl - Vinyl vs. Digital that we found interesting (along with 3 million others...)
• On the other side of the spectrum, YouTuber Abnormal Grooves claims (in 12 minutes) why vinyl is better than CDs and MP3s! (He's trolling you with the title - he's actually talking about vinyl hacks that can't be done on any other medium, like double-grooves, lock-grooves, and more!)
• YouTuber TechMoan laboriously reviews Digital Audio on VHS - in 1981: D.A.T. before DAT - The Technics SV-P100 in 33 minutes.
• I bet you might not have known that every DAT tape came with a pre-paid DAT Tax that was used to pay for the obvious copyright infringement they expected with the format.
• YouTuber TechMoan is back with a storied history of Digital Audio Tape: The one DAT got away and how the recording industry decided it had to die.
• The Pudding tries to quantify the songs that will characterize the ’90s through surveys and science!
• ConcertHotels has a chart of The Vocal Ranges of the Greatest Singers (Axl Rose is impressive!)
• HowToGeek has a strongly worded warning: The CDs You Burned Are Going Bad: Here’s What You Need to Do
• Sound and vision blog gets technical with restoring the first recording of computer music. With out a reference pitch, it's nearly impossible to guess how it might actually sound.
• Follow along as a Google Engineer built an AI-powered searchable archive of his family videos.
• Want to use Python to automate seamless beat-matching (like a DJ) to digital audio tracks? Check out pyCrossfade on GitHub by user oguzhan-yilmaz

June 2020 - More COVID-19

We had a few days of downtime in the recording studio last month as a water heater broke and flooded the studio over the Memorial Day weekend. No media or equipment was in trouble - it simply doused our carpet. Super exciting photo of the wet carpet drying out to the right. All is dry and back to regular recording sessions as we update our blog for the month of June 2020.

• Need to provide some audio editing and don't want to download an audio editor? AudioMass is a web browser-based audio editor - simply drop your audio file into the browser window and do basic edits and fades!
• Android Authority gives you the full 411 on Digital Tenancy, and why you don't really own your digital life.
• Blogger Michael Lynch has a fascinating two-part series on his Eight-Year Quest to Digitize 45 Videotapes (Link to Part 2) where he concedes it's best to use a professional service (like us!) to get better video captures. He demonstrates the painful shortcomings of some of the available video capture D.I.Y. options available today.
• We sidestep our usual media focus to reveal our recently noticed confirmation bias when it comes to our prescient concept of working a shorter, four day work week. A flurry of stories, predicting disrupted working schedules to accommodate the new socially distant culture:
  • The Business Insider covers Presidential Candidate Andrew Yang and his suggestion that the US should consider 4-day workweek with 3-day weekend.
  • The Guardian writes about New Zealand's Prime minister Jacinda Ardern and her plan of a four-day working week as way to rebuild New Zealand after Covid-19.
  • Fast Company offers a new schedule for work during COVID-19: 4 days on, 10 days off

May 2020 - Still COVID-19

We're still closed for drop-off submissions until mid-summer, but we're still accepting mailed-in jobs submissions on our many digital conversion websites for VHS Tapes, Vinyl Records,Tape Cassettes, Reel-to-Reels, Minidiscs, DAT's, Microcassettes, Audio CD Ripping, or Video DVD Ripping, as well as updating this blog with new stories during the pandemic shutdown in May of 2020.

• Watched everything on NetFlix and need something nostalgic? The Internet Archive has MTV VHS Recordings from 1981 to 1989 for a trip down memory lane (back when they played videos in full!)
• Imgur hosts this video of pressing a colored vinyl record - where flecks of discarded black vinyl is added to make streaks in the final vinyl record!
• Having watched a near constant stream of endless free content on YouTube, Tom Scott teaches you everything you need to know about Copyright and YouTube (warning: 42 minutes...)
• Relive the 1990's with this DVD player screensaver brought back to life! Watch the Bouncing DVD Logo finally hit a corner!
• Colin Woodbury details his media acquisition strategy for bringing his DVD media library online using Plex and a tiny Raspberry Pi!
• The New York Times profiles another aging artifact: The Electric Recording Co. in London cuts albums the way they were made in the 1950s and '60s
• Returning to our previous stories on DJing with tape decks, Resident Advisor has a hour long video of US house titan DJ Kerri Chandler rocking their London office on reel-to-reel tape players (warning: language!)
• Ars Technica details why 'baking' damaged reel-to-reel tapes renders them playable again.
• The American Chemical Society on Phys.org unwinds the mystery of degraded reel-to-reel tapes with a more chemical analysis.
• LoudWire lists the many reason why 8-Track Tapes failed as a media format In Remembrance: WTF Was the Deal With 8-Track Tapes?
• Open Preservation Foundation deconstructs the many formats of tape data backup when recovering '90s data tapes in BitCurator
• One person's trash is a scientist's rhizotron - Massive Science shows scientists recycling old CD jewelcases to make planters so they can see the roots!
• Once again, The Atlantic suggests our own working hours are ahead of it's time with To Safely Reopen, Make the Workweek Shorter

April 2020 - COVID-19 Edition

• Our usual April Fools antics are postponed until next year, as the only news dominating the airwaves these days is the Coronavirus Pandemic. Our own Covid-19% Off Sale just wrapped up from March 20 through April 1st, and we heartily thank all of the customers who took advantage of our sale and ensured a future for this small business! Alas, we're still closed for dropoffs until July 1st, in order to prevent the spread. All job submissions must be mailed into our offices.
• The Internet Archive has announced the National Emergency Library to Provide Digitized Books to Students and the Public - basically offering 1.4 million copyrighted books for free online! Read their announcement with links, or see what Ars Technica has to say about the same story. It's all good news and unlimited choices for any home-bound students!
• Are the ultimate cord cutter, but still need your Weird Video fix? (Especially now that you're quarantined at home?) The AV Club reviews the weirdest new uploads to the Internet Archive's VHS Vault.
• VICE Magazine explores the result of too many streaming services: More and more people are Torrenting shows, and Generation Z is leading the way.
• Our favorite internet comic XKCD details the results of attempting to keep any type of digital library: You're always a Pirate...
• Jeff Huang pontificates on keeping things around... forever! This Page is Designed to Last: A Manifesto for Preserving Content on the Web
• YouTube expert TechMoan explains how a forgotten 1949 Format War shaped the future of records. This 39 minute video details why 45rpm records have big holes versus full albums (LP's) which have small holes in the center.
  
• NBC News is clearly in ♥ with VHS with two recent stories about it, claiming it's both back in vogue as everything old is new again, and 'go-to in the digital age'.
• Show Me The Money! This group of artists is trying to recreating a 90s-era video store and stocking it with 14,000 copies of "Jerry Maguire". CNN covered the story first, and their first attempt at creating a huge pyramid of VHS tapes was successful. Keep up the good work Everything is Terrible!
• This photoshopped Bible On Tape looks hilarious. I can imagine the tone of voice in my head so well....
• In a clearly April-Fools-Day joke that should have been postponed, Dennis Quaid Says He's Releasing New Podcast Via Cassette.
• Returning to our previous stories on DJing with Tape Decks, Synthtopia gives details on the DIY Dual-Cassette DJ Rig, The Tapetron-2!
• What's on that Tape Cassette? Full-Color, Full-Motion Video! Hackaday covers the technical leaps one must jump through to do this (lower resolution, lower frame rate) with plenty of demo video!
• Just when you thought hardware was dead... New Atlas covers the release of a new Kickstarter cassette deck (really?) which adds BlueTooth to a classic device. Made by a french company, the Mystik portable music player awaits audio cassette revival.
• Beware of Cheap Tape Decks! YouTuber The 8-Bit Guy literally breaks down this inexpensive boombox with 'MP3 Recording' ability that he determines is both low-quality and mono audio! This quick 15 minute video shows how NOT to create MP3 music from cassette!
  
• I'm glad to have stumbled across Davis Remmel's site, where he details his robotic 3-d printed CD Rip Robot and hardbound Book Scanning techniques, which can be used for your own digital archiving.
• The NYU School of Law gripes about the YouTube Copyright System, and how it prevents posting legal arguments in this discussion: How Explaining Copyright Broke the YouTube Copyright System.
• Michael Steil at PageTable details how he setup a system for Dumping MiniDisc Media by copying the ATRAC1 audio and converting it to full-resolution audio on a computer. Very technical instructions ahead!
• Do you think you could get by without a SIM card in your smartphone? Author Josh Habdas shows you how, a year later.

March 2020

• Happy 50th Birthday to the Compact Cassette Tape! Still being hand-rewound with pencils!
• Speaking of cassettes - The Guardian has the story of a fan reunited with cassette 25 years after losing it!
• Pitchfork follows the 2008 fire at Universal Studios Hollywood that resulted in Audio Masters being Damaged in a Warehouse Fire
• Rolling Stone Magazine reviews the trouble most record stores are having these days: terrible distribution options! The few major distributors are slow to send new music to stores!
• Pitchfork surveys the damage from the February 2020 'Devastating' Manufacturing Plant Fire that threatens the Worldwide Vinyl Record Supply. It "will present a problem for the vinyl industry worldwide"
• Vice Magazine gets to the heart of why Archivists Are Uploading Hundreds of Random VHS Tapes to the Internet.
• Two months ago, we mentioned the closing of Murfie, a small Wisconsin company that stored thousands of people’s CDs and then suddenly vanished overnight. The Verge is happy to introduce you to John Fenley, who bought them all for $6,000, and is planning on getting the service up and running again!
• Hi-Fi News write a love letter to the beloved resurgence of analog nostalgia, and the Reel to Reel Tape Deck
• I bet you didn't think it was possible to 'see sound' until you watch this short video demonstration of a Magnetic Tape Viewer:
  
• The Verge has a detailed backstory of the Oh Sees’ year-long effort to put their albums on 8-track box sets. Yes, 8-tracks. Hipster to a fault?
• Vice Magazine profiles copyright champions Damien Riehl and Noah Rubin, who generated and saved every possible melody to a hard drive, then released it all to the public in an attempt to stop musicians from getting sued!
• We love our 4-day workweek, and are only encouraged by this recent NPR story on the 4-Day Workweek's Appeal Goes Global As Bosses Seek To Boost Profits And Morale

February 2020

• The U.S. Copyright Office details More Information on Fair Use - the very fine legal line in which we operate, and why we don't make more than one copy of any copyrighted work.
• Enjoy some future Analog Nostalgia from the New York Times in this Op-Ed from the Future: We Should Have Bought the DVD's (A plea to stop paying for access to streaming services for content you might have already owned.)
• DJ TechTools details the curious hack of the TDJ ONE: a ridiculous tape-player mod of a CDJ! A DJ made two pitch-controlled top-loading tape decks for live performances.
• What does a Tape DJ look like? We'll have to go back to 1991 to see Mr. Tape stun the crowd at the DMC World Championships with his dual Reel-to-Reel DJ set. He uses hip-hop DJ tricks like marking the tape itself for the beats, and fancy finger-work and backspinning to replay phrases. Fascinating!
• We compress many of our video conversions into MPEG-4 files, and use the H.264 video codec. Read how author Sid Bala describes how H.264 is Magic: a technical walkthrough of a remarkable technology.
• As time goes on, as online video codecs continue to improve (bigger images, smaller file sizes, more frames), the Evil Martians’ blog previews Better web video with AV1 Codec - a new video codec designed to compete with previous codec generations such as H.264

December 2019-January 2020

• Looking to store your crates of vinyl in an easy to browse form (something akin to your old days of flipping vinyl at the local record store? Watch as user Theseamusjames details how he built a record cabinet! (seen to the right)
• In the Pat Ourselves On The Back Award, the Prime Minister of Finland suggests our working hours are futuristic!
• I know what you're thinking: This Christmas Movie looks so familiar...
• Are the ultimate cord cutter, but still need 8000+ publicly available Internet Protocol television (IPTV) channels to watch? Browse this collection of links on GitHub!
• DJ Mag shows us the first playable record made from recycled ocean plastic! It looks terrible, and I seriously doubt the quality of audio - I always find colorful vinyl discs more susceptible to pits that ruin perfectly good pressings.
• Even the Cloud can't be trusted! The Verge follows the story of Murfie, a small Wisconsin company that stored thousands of people’s CDs, then suddenly vanished!
• RedShark News shows us why Cassette tapes might be obsolete, but they can be a wonderful creative tool
• Sounds like a golden opportunity for us! Bravewords details how ELO leader Jeff Lynne claims to have 2,000 Cassette Tapes Of Unheard ELO Tracks, and no tape deck to play them on. Call us up, Jeff!
• You can buy a NEW cassette deck in 2020? This French company just announced a New Cassette Player for 21st century!
• Birth.Movies.Death tells us how the Alamo Drafthouse released a movie: 'STUCK ON VHS A Visual History of Video Store Stickers'
• In yet another nostalgic throwback to classic analog, Collider has a lovely review of 'VHYes: A Heartfelt VHS Throwback Comedy'

October-November 2019

• Are the ultimate cord cutter, but still need your classic Movies fix? CineDanton (picture to the right) offers +2100 Free Public Domain Movies from Archive.org, in a new easily searchable UI that allows for easy browsing and viewing!
• VICE Magazine has an interesting article about 'disc-rot', the Hidden Phenomenon That Could Ruin Your Old CD's and DVD's!
• In 1982, Video piracy was hardly a crime in Canada. The CBC Archives details the differences between piracy fines in the U.S. vs. Canada.
• debugmo.de has a detailed breakdown of the way data is encoded onto a DVD, and the hacking he did to trace and sniff the data as it was being read off the DVD live, generating RAW data.
• Are you a digital DJ and looking to upgrade your Mac? The Verge warns you that Apple’s macOS Catalina update is a big problem for DJs who relied on iTunes
• From the Stars and Stripes comes an interesting audio recovery of a obsolete recording. It was a dispatch from D-Day!
• You think you have a lot of records? They measure this collection by weight: Eight tons of Punk, The Outline details the demise and attempt to save print magazine Maximum Rock n Roll’s huge punk music archive.
• Ernie Smith writes for Tedium all about Tape Hiss: The Underlying Noise Quietly Driving Modern Music
• Pitchfork points out something else holding up the sudden resurgence of cassette tapes: Worldwide Material Shortage Delays Cassette Tape Production
• Is that a cassette tape, or a MIXXTAPE? Check out this Reinvented Cassette - it's a MP3 player that works in your tape deck! (a bit pricey at $100, but it keeps it's good looks and form factor!)
• Before you toss those old VHS tapes, you should review Screencrush's 20 VHS Tapes That Are Still Extremely Valuable

September 2019

• Are the ultimate cord cutter, but still need your live TV fix? Stanford Universities Puffer project (pictured to right) is a work in progress where they're looking for data about re-encoding video streams using AI, and offering you 6 channels of national feeds for you to feast on (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, PBS, Univision!)
• Who better to explain how a vinyl record gets made than Mister Rogers' Neighborhood? (from 1972)
• NME documents the resurrection of Vinyl with it being set to outsell CDs for first time since 1986! Alas, the top sellers are all reprints of classic albums, and new artists are rarely represented.
• Student Springer at The Rachel and Selim Benin School of Computer Science and Engineering took to scanning the grooves on a record and trying to see if you could transcribe the audio from one format to another. His results are recognizable, but hardly audible.
• Ever heard of a Capacitance Electronic Disc? It was about the same size and shape of a vinyl record, but could play back about an hour of video and audio using a similar needle-in-the-groove playback system. Developed by RCA in 1964, it fell from any common use by 1981, killed by Laserdisc, with it's better picture and longer runtime. Read more about it on Wikipedia!
• VICE documents how Libraries and Archivists Are Scanning and Uploading Books That Are Secretly in the Public Domain.
• University of Michigan Law School's Jessica Litman has an interesting paper that suggests that any securing or defending of copyrights rarely benefit the original author's, but instead of the corporations who hold the copyright, thereby diminishing the ability to pass on the author's legacies. An interesting take - go download 'What We Don't See When We See Copyright as Property by Jessica Litman'.

August 2019

• Pictured to the right is the 1976 Sony Chorocco which was a toy Volkswagen van with built-in speakers that played the music while driving around the surface of a record. They generally were very hard on the groove of albums, and quickly ruined many albums with repeated plays.
• Cassette tapes are making a comeback. But it's about the culture, not the sound, according to the Los Angeles Times.
• The most-expensive cassette tape in the world sells for US $4117, according to Australia’s News.com.au (Our cassette tape conversion seems like a downright steal compared to this...)
• Vlogger Tech Moan details the Sears DC International Cassette, a proprietary cassette tape clone format so consumers had to buy hardware and consumables exclusively from Sears!

June/July 2019

• Click the image to the right to see the high-resolution image of a the Original Puzzle Company's 'Restored 1980 YouTube Machine', a custom painted VHS Player!
• Atlas Obscura covers the story of Philadelphian Marion Stokes Who Preserved Over 30 Years of TV History on 71,000 VHS and Beta Tapes
• Jessie Schiewe over at OK Whatever talks about why Analog tapes are making a comeback, as Lamps, Tables, Birdhouses, and more!
• RedShark News details about the 'Cartrivision', and early alternative videotape format in the 1970's that was two sided like a Cassette Tape!
• Another coffin nail for VHS tapes - the University of New Hampshire will remove VCRs from classrooms this summer...
• Drexel University’s Music Industry program resurrects long-lost funk music from Philadelphia's Sigma Sound
• Bloomberg posts about how Cassette Tapes Are Back -- But It's Not About the Music (but culture and psychology!
• Bloomberg Business has a three and a half minute YouTube video profiles the National Audio Company, the one factory left in the United States that still manufactures cassette tapes
• Andrew Liszewski at Gizmodo waxes nostalgia about MiniDisc's (Yes, We still convert them!)
• You know who else loves MiniDiscs? Radiohead singer Thom Yorke, who had to release 18 hours of material to thwart a ransom demand by a Leaker
• New York Times journalist Ben Sisario raves about the benefits of an audio Compact Disc: No Ads, No Privacy Terrors, No Algorithms
• Inside Tokyo's audiophile venues, where Aaron Coultate at Resident Advisor explains why Tokyo might be the best place in the world to listen to music.
• Just across the Ocean, Ben Ratliff at the New York Times covers the very similar Los Angeles Vinyl Cafe scene.
• Think that flexidisc is thin? The Guardian details why Soviet bootleg records were pressed on x-rays!

April 2019

• Click the image to the right to see the high-resolution image of a Bankrupt Blockbuster Store painted on a VHS Tape by artist Dave Pollot
• Nostalgia trip or Money Grab? They still make Cassette Tape Vending Machines for a whole new generation of music fans who like to shop from a machine.
• Get into Vinyl because you wanted to be a DJ? Watch this The Art of DJing with Jeff Mills for an example of a master at work - he talks about beat-matching, song selection, and more!
• We found this Life Hack from 1988 that tickled our funny bone (clearly not really from 1988...)
• Another sign of the impending apocalypse for 5" media - the MPAA reports DVD and Blu-ray sales nearly halved over five years
• Think your iTunes Library is big? Meet the Digital Hoarders Who Collect Tumblrs, Medieval Manuscripts, and Terabytes of Text Files

March 2019

• You Could Win $1,000,000 Instantly! Play This Record Now! - Click the image to the right to hear the 2-minute contest/album release by McDonalds. They produced 80 million of these flexi-discs in 1988, with only 1 being a winner! (this one is not it!)
• Open Culture has pictures of Postage Stamps from Bhutan That Double as Playable Vinyl Records!, and if you love the album cover art, you'll love the wordpress site: LP Cover Art with nearly 7,000 album covers in their public database!
• Let's talk VHS Tapes! You should dig through your own collection to see if you have one of these highly collectible (and valuable) 10 VHS tapes that are Worth Money (No, Really!) from Mental Floss. While you're digging through your VHS tapes, consider how small your collection may seem next to this Massive, Obsessive and (Probably) Obsolete VHS Boxing Archive detailed by the New York Times.
• ZDNet crafts an early obituary for the end of Blu-ray, while across the pond, The Telegraph declares the new Hipster embrace of cassettes fuels demand for magnetic tape!
• Ian Tamblyn over at Roots Music Canada weighs heavily on why artists are no longer making a living making music, placing the blame on the internet and free downloading.
• On the technical side of things, Nirbheek offers a simple method of measuring audio latency on a computer through a loopback cable, and Ryan Parman on his Flailing Wildly blog details on Serving Bandwidth-Friendly Video with HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), an interesting use case of avoiding YouTube to host your files and still maintain low costs.
• Another reason why we only operate in the United States! The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports that more than 130 European businesses tell the European Parliament: Reject the #CopyrightDirective

February 2019

• Look at this photo of a heart-warming letter an eBay Seller received after selling his old VCR to a delighted customer! While wiping away your tears, it's best you get out your own VHS tapes now and save your memories while you can! Only $18 per tape converted to DVD!
• Is this the death-knell for Blu-Ray format? Samsung calls it quits on 4K Blu-ray players in 2019 according to this TechSpot article. Just as 5.25" optical drives are being removed from nearly all computers...
• Speaking of slow deaths, The Guardian pitches it’s cool to spool again as the cassette returns on a wave of nostalgia. Cassette-only releases? It's like it's 1980 all over again!
• Who owns your streaming music? Certainly not you - Bloomberg documents the music streaming behemoth Vivendi may sell Universal
• Leonardo Chiariglione goes into great technical detail of the Thirty years of audio encoding in MPEG formats.

January 2019

• Blank VHS Covers were kinda Beautiful: This 2 minute animated video takes you on a nostalgia tour!
  
• Has VHS jumped the shark? Yes, now that Urban Outfitters now selling used VHS Tapes! This is what happens when you mix a Hipster and a Blockbuster.
• F-Stoppers makes the Case for Digitizing Your Old VHS Tapes (They link to a national competitor, but we can all agree that this service can be provided with great quality and attention to detail right here!)
• The Smithsonian lists a few of the works that will lose their copyright protections for the first time in 20 years in 2019.
• Ars Technica dimes out that Mickey Mouse will be public domain soon! Well, not the Mickey Mouse of now, but of it's long forgotten origin.
• In the good-news-for-future-work department, Fortune Magazine reports Vinyl And Cassette Sales Saw Growth Last Year! Are Millennials reaffirming my business model for another generation?

December 2018

• Wikipedia always comes through with a thorough collection: Timeline of audio formats! Great if you need to identify the maximum age of your media!
• TorrentFreak complains that YouTube's Copyright Protection System is a Total Mess.

November 2018

• Everything is an App! Use the Goldmine guidelines to grade your Vinyl Records & Sleeves for eventual sale on eBay! Don't have a disappointed customer complain of inaccurate grading with this free app by Raphael Yancey!
• Leonardo Chiariglione goes into great detail about the Life inside MPEG standards.

October 2018

• Blast from the Past! Here you will find the beautiful pictures of sealed Vintage Cassettes, all in an old school gallery format and custom domain. Relive the mix Tapes of your Youth!
• Jacob Buchowiecki details how he learned How to Rip Blu Ray Discs, and what a pain it is.

August 2018

• Not Always Right points out that we're all supposed to follow copyright law with Two Wrongs Don't Make a Copyright! Legally, you can't make endless copies of anything!
• We rip thousands of CD's per year, and when we do, each CD gets handled once or twice, but read why John Millikin ripped the same CD 300 times! All in the pursuit of a single track on a badly mastered CD; the technical breakdown of the data is astounding!

June-July 2018

• Open Culture details that Optical Scanning Technology Lets Researchers Recover Lost Indigenous Languages from Old Wax Cylinder Recordings
• Need it to last forever? The Atlantic agrees that Microfilm Lasts Half a Millennium
• Rolling Stone Magazine details the history of another dead format: Revolution at 3.5″: Inside Vaporwave’s Mini-Boom of Floppy Disk Releases
• Popular Mechanics shows The VCR That Suffered And Died to Make Digital Video Look Like VHS

April 2018

• The Star points out that the broadcaster CBC is destroying its broadcast archives after they’re digitized! (A bold move - we don't recommend this for our own customers!)
• Dmitry Brant details how he used some hardware hacks to read Soviet magnetic reel tapes!

September 2017

• Upgrade no more! - why bother with 4k video? You can't even see in 4K, according to the Knowing Better YouTube series (19 minutes).
  

December 2016

• A bit of heavy reading, but you can download this 292kb PDF report on The Effects of MP3 Compression on Perceived Emotional Characteristics in Musical Instruments. Does the MP3 format have a rebuttal?

May 2014

• The Atlantic Magazine gives you fair warning from the Library of Congress: Your Old CDs Aren't Just Aging; They're Actively Dying! Now is the best time to rip them!

April 2012

• Ian Corbett writes for Sound on Sound magazine exactly What Data Compression (MP3 mostly) Does To Your Music