Phantoms Found at Paris Opera – The March Smithsonian Magazine had a fascinating article “How The Phantom of the Opera led me to a long-lost musical treasure in Paris.” A researcher, Michael Walsh, had found a room 20 years ago several stories under the Paris Opera House, with a plaque acknowledging that its contents were a June 1907 gift of an American who ran the Gramophone Company’s offices in Paris. He had been a pioneer in the transition from cylinders to discs. His gift had the condition that the room not be opened until 2007, which it was! Inside, carefully packed into two large metal urns, were 24 pristine gramophone discs featuring among others Caruso, Melba, Patti and Calvé. Like Aida and her lover, the discs had been entombed for a century beneath this great architectural monument. The Opera National de Paris and the Bibliotheque Nationale de France were overjoyed at the discovery.
Singer Miriam Makeba Dies – Legendary South African Grammy Award winner Miriam Makeba has died at age 76 after a performance in Italy. She was the first black South African musician to gain international fame, and was a champion in the fight against apartheid. She performed with Paul Simon on his Graceland tour, and her last U.S. studio recording was Reflections – released on Heads Up International in 2004.
Digitizing 45,000 Records in Ten Months – Public radio station KCRW in Santa Monica, CA, airs a huge variety of pop, jazz and world music. Their disc library includes 30,000 vinyl records and 25,000 CDs. The difficulties of accessing the huge collection for on-air programs was a major cost of time and effort and most of the library was unknown to most of the DJs most of the time. A larger and larger proportion of their recordings became effectively “lost” to current programming.
The solution was digitizing 45,000 of those records which they selected out and sent to Reclaim Media in Seattle. There they were converted to WAV files accompanied by XML metadata files, and imported into a professional broadcast audio server called Dalet. Dalet facilitates working with a huge database of audio files. So now KCRW’s music is no longer locked up on physical discs but can be easily searched, browsed, auditioned and programming – even from multiple locations. The eclectic music collection has returned to circulation. The station was so pleased with the result that they referred a Canadian station to Reclaim Media and this station had 75,000 CDs digitized.
New App Adds “Vinyl Sound” – Recording engineers, both consumer-level and pro, can now add vinyl record sounds to their original digital recordings if that’s the effect they want to tie in with the rebirth of public interest in vinyl. Billed as “the ultimate low-fi weapon,” Vinyl 1.73 from iZotope Vinyl makes any audio sound like a poor vinyl recording! It allows users to add any of these wonderful attributes of bad vinyl: mechanical noise, electrical noise, 60Hz hum, sounds of worn-out records, dust, scratch, distortion, warped records. It can change mono to stereo and vice versa and even can achieve the specific “sound” of many turntable systems – from the latest linear-tracking turntables back to 1930s-period phonographs.
