they advertize these extensive in the fogey press.

Do you have to connect them to the mains? Or is the USB link enough to operate the turntable?

they advertize these extensive in the fogey press.

Oh shit. Expect old folks across the land to confusingly ask their stressed out offspring “what’s this USB business, then?” and “how do I play music off the computer, then?”.

(Or just my bloody folks.)

Or is the USB link enough to operate the turntable?

Yes

Ah! Now it makes a bit more sense.

I’d been saying “Just get a USB to Jackplug Cable, mate!” up to now.

Mind you, still true.

I probably would’ve got a USB one if I’d really thought about it. It’s easy enough for me to run mine thru amp and line-in to PC tho.

i was gonna get one of them newfangled turntables:

hammacher schlemmer lp-to-mp3 converter

but now we are just running the stereo into the computer and i don’t need to.

Is the idea with digitizing vinyl that the stuff is too rare to download? Seems like downloading is much faster than ripping vinyl.

as i say it’s advertized to people who don’t know how to use p2p systems — and obviously it’s cheaper than re-buying their collection (at 128)! also hell yeah some stuff just isn’t on cd or buyable download yet.

Seems like downloading is much faster than ripping vinyl.
— Mark (mark-...), December 20th, 2006 2:46 PM. (later)

It used to be, back in the AudioGalaxy days, if you included ‘finding the album, minidisc taping it, feeding it into xputer, manually finding track gaps, etc...

Not now, now it’s harder to find the stuff online.

Is the idea with digitizing vinyl that the stuff is too rare to download?

in my case yes

Someone totally needs to start a rental service for this. I would like to use one for a while, until the stuff I can’t find digitally is done, and then return it.

It used to be, back in the AudioGalaxy days, if you included ‘finding the album, minidisc taping it, feeding it into xputer, manually finding track gaps, etc...

Not now, now it’s harder to find the stuff online.

— M Grout

Yeah, I was on dial-up during the AudioGalaxy era, unfortunately. Do find that Torrent sites are pretty huge now though. But obviously a ton has never made it to CD or been ripped.

in my case yes

So anyway, how do I access your archives?

xpost so was I.

most of the stuff i’ve been recording isn’t really that rare as it’s mostly 90s dance stuff. i don’t like downloading anything less than 256kbps is part of the problem. i was thinking of doing a little blog next year for most if not all of the vinyl stuff i rip tho so look out for that.

a few years back i began the mammoth task of digitising around 1000 records ... it is a total fucking PITA, and i can really only be arsed when i am 100% in the mood for an afternoon’s tooling about setting recording levels and swearing and manually putting in fucking track markers and swearing and ... you get the picture.

i find it marginally easier to scout about for stuff on ye interwebbe, but even then it’s hugely annoying when, for some reason, you can find every track from an album EXCEPT ONE.

now i find myself delighted when i stumble across some rare, forgotten vinyl gem in the cupboard and decide to listen to it; it’s almost a pleasure to have some music that isn’t digital. at least, that’s what i’m trying to convince myself.

a learned colleague told me at the weekend that USB turntables were “shite”, but i’m not sure whether to believe her or not. given that i’ve got a trusty 13-year-old thorens turntable, an even trustier 14-year-old nad amp with line out, and a powerbook with line in, i don’t give a fuck :)

i would be totally unsurprised if they are shite. w

manually putting in fucking track markers

dude, just record it all in one track and throw it into a WAV editor like Cool Edit Pro or Peak, then chop it up into tracks. Be sure you have something like Trader’s Little Helper (PC) or xACT (Mac) to take out the sector boundary errors when you’re done, though, especially if you make track cuts while there’s still signal.

I used to have to do that with my Sony CDRW33, then I got a G4 and Peak. Life is much easier.

Yes, I do that now.

But I can’t go back and run it *then*

>> It used to be, back in the AudioGalaxy days, if you included ‘finding the album, minidisc taping it, feeding it into xputer, manually finding track gaps, etc...

>> Not now, now it’s harder to find the stuff online.

Uh, ever hear of Soulseek?

I don’t get how so many people lament the loss of Audiogalaxy while I continue to find HUGE QUANTITIES of obscure music that was never on Audiogalaxy or Napster with relative ease.

“i was thinking of doing a little blog next year for most if not all of the vinyl stuff i rip tho so look out for that.”

i’m just gonna put everything on ILM. it’s fun! though i have been considering getting my own website. i’m sick of blogs. maria pays 200 dollars a year for hers. i might still do something like that.

“and i can really only be arsed when i am 100% in the mood for an afternoon’s tooling about setting recording levels and swearing and manually putting in fucking track markers”

audacity makes this really easy. i am no expert though.

Yeah, I use audacity too. You can just record a side at a time and then it takes 3 or 4 mins to chop it up and name the files. Not too much hassle when you get the hang of the software.

Colonel Poo, you must run a completely different version of Soulseek than me.

fwiw we’ve ordered the Numark from HMV. I don’t even own a record player, so this’ll be worthwhile so long as it works.

the only way i can find older stuff on slsk is by putting it on the wishlist and leaving the computer on all night so there’s enough time for results to come back. tho usually the results after 8 hours are still rather pitiful and rarely yield anything above 192.

About half my vinyl (maybe 300 bits of it) hasn’t made it to CD, SLSK, or anywhere downloadable. I often think of getting a t’table to transfer the choice bits, but I don’t really have anywhere to put it. I wouldn’t get a USB turntable, in any case: If you don’t like the ADCs, then there’s no way to swap ’em out.

Plus, I already have some pretty high quality Digi and MOTU ADCs.

i dunno about the numark but the Ion is a complete piece of shit, and way overpriced. someone forgot that when you sell a “usb turntable” there should be something resembling an actual turntable in there somewhere. it’s made of extremely cheap plastic, comes with a useless cartridge, has almost no way to correct skating or input volume. digitizing dance 12“ was a mess due to constant clipping and no way to reduce the input.

absolute crap. avoid.

Thanks for the tip, mikebee—I was seriously thinking of getting one in the new year!

the only way i can find older stuff on slsk is by putting it on the wishlist and leaving the computer on all night so there’s enough time for results to come back. tho usually the results after 8 hours are still rather pitiful and rarely yield anything above 192.
— sede vacante (n...), December 20th, 2006.

Yeah, the wishlist is key. It helps putting in different variations to find the same thing. For instance, last night:

Smoke Some Kill: 0 results

“Signifying Rapper”, a track on Smoke Some Kill: 5 results, all of which also contain the words “smoke some kill” wtf

The Soulseek search engine is a mysterious thing.

Plus if you’re looking for stuff by Monitor or Gore be prepared to wade through a lot of crap.

Martin L. Gore solo albums DO NOT WANT

Has slsk for the Mac gotten off the ground yet?

I’ve used SSX with few problems. Less a hastle then nicotine.

ssX is a lot better than Nicotine, but after a day of running, it’ll start to hog all the CPU. I’ve tried tuning ssX to fix this, but no option I set seems to do jack.

The only thing I haven’t tried is nicing it up a few notches after start. Which is worth a shot, I s’pose.

I don’t know what those things mean, but if you have a way for SSX to run faster without destroying my first generation G5, please share.

When ssX is running, open up Terminal and type in the following:

renice -n 20 `ps axwww | grep -i ‘[s]sx’ | awk ‘{print $1}’`

That will make ssX SLOWER than everything else (which is what I’d prefer, since ssX sucks up all the CPU and makes the other apps slow). If you want to make ssX FASTER than everything else — this probably isn’t going to make any difference at all to you — do this:

sudo renice -n -20 `ps axwww | grep -i ‘[s]sx’ | awk ‘{print $1}’`

Be sure to get the quote marks exactly as I have them, too.

duderz, solarseek!

Is Solarseek no longer the useless, unstable piece of garbage it was earlier this year?

weird, i find ssx to be relatively light, resource-wise, especially compared to nicotine, azureus etc

It seems like ssX runs significantly better on my Intel-Mac than on my previous G4.

The resource use may well have something to do with factors such as library size and network speed: If one has a large library and a fat pipe, then there may be more searches per unit time stressing the SLSK agent, for instance. If the agent is trying to handle all the incoming requests fairly — Nicotine being rumored NOT to do this to the fullest extent possible — then the “faithful” clients are gonna stress out more.

That said, I have my ssX tuned rather tight: Outgoing bandwidth is low, I’ve disabled all unnecessary “server” features, and so on. Still, it winds up like a testicle strap on a bull after about a day. My feeling is that the SLSK search algorithm favors peers that have been online longer, since they’ve “proven” themselves as better providers, due to their relative stability, etc., thus they’re stressed more the longer they’re online. ssX may not be up to the task.

I’ll have to check out SolarSeek (again). It was a miserable lump of crap the last time I used the pre-recode version, and the latest totally-reworked version was in a codemire for the longest time. People got jobs and shit, I guess. I’d sooner do ssX than Nicotine, in any case, and Nicotine >>> Azureus. I dunno if anyone here remembers when Azureus had a bug that caused it to k-panic 2xG5s, but that was a real nasty one.

SolarSeek 0.95.3 == Unpromising.

Sod the USB turntable. with about this?

What the fuck?

And it’s priced at $300, for which you can get a barely decent non-USB guitar.

“i dunno about the numark but the Ion is a complete piece of shit, and way overpriced.”

when i was thinking about buying one, the model that got the most positive press/feedback was the one that audio technica puts out. and it’s cheap too. and, yeah, i read too much negative stuff about the ion to even consider it.

I don’t know if it’s still the case, but there were two seperate soulseek networks going at one time — one with the newer beta protocol, one with the classic protocol. I remember running both clients occasionally and getting different results...

So is the preamp any good on USB turntables, and would I get really get less background noise using a cheap belt drive table like that than I would using a good direct drive one?

i’m actually in the market right now for a preamp interface between a turntable (in this case a technics 1200mk2) and a computer, to replace the POS ion. i had convinced my employers to purchase the ion to implement an idea of mine, and while they still really like the idea, the ion has been nothing but a fucking headache.

xpost way back.

WhenAudGal went down, I did suddenly find that all the really obscure stuff I’d been looking for for years, I’d actually got now, and was kinda stuck for new ‘searches’.

And Kazaa was such a pain/computereater, I lost the will to go S/sk.

Audiogalaxy was great at the time but things like soulseek and private mp3 only torrent sites are far better & easier to get whole albums/ep’s and yes theres plenty of stuff thats never been on cd about.

napster/kazaa were a joke unless you wanted britney spears or a virus

i’m actually in the market right now for a preamp interface between a turntable (in this case a technics 1200mk2) and a computer, to replace the POS ion. i had convinced my employers to purchase the ion to implement an idea of mine, and while they still really like the idea, the ion has been nothing but a fucking headache.
— mikebee (anotherdimensio...), December 21st, 2006.

Just get a regular phono preamp/receiver and plug it into this:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000BD1AF0

Or run it directly into the line-in on your computer. Scott’s been getting good results with that.

Another Slsk feature I love: Search, no results. Stop search, search again, many many results. However, as pointed out it’s stable as hell and not a resource hog if you’re running wintel.

Are these the turntables Cory Doctorow uses to play his useful Barenaked Ladies USB pens?

What the fuck?

And it’s priced at $300, for which you can get a barely decent non-USB guitar.

I’ve messed about with one. It plays about as well as you would imagine, which is to say, if you’re into super-high fretboard action and strings that go out of tune after a minute or two of strumming, well, go nuts.

anybody know anything about this:

http://www.amazon.com/Griffin-Technologies-3254-PWRW-PowerWave/dp/B00008LDHX

?

mikebee—I’ve got one and it’s pretty much my go-to analog->digital box. I haven’t run across any app that it doesn’t work with and it’s noise-free (unlike the horrid iMic).

so i ended up going with the Edirol USB interface and a small phono preamp. will let you folks know what happens...