Out-of-print vinyl for the discerning groove digger

First of all, thanks a lot to everyone who left a comment after the closedown of this blog and the words of appreciation, concern and support, they made it a lot easier for me to deal with this loss. It is debatable if the world is a better place now, after “justice has been done” by forcing me to respect the copyright law. From my perspective, the loss for the music community as a whole is a lot greater than the benefit for the copyright holder, the format suffered a backlash, but this was not the concern of Chuck’s lawyers, who might have been a little overeager. At least, they didn’t actually sue me or ask for a fantasy figure of losses to compensate, so they showed some reason in the end. Most important, they made me aware what I am not prepared for, and that is a legal dispute. So the closedown of the blog is final.

I still consider Chuck Mangione to be a great artist, and if he or someone else was the driving force remains unclear, maybe his lawyers have lost the skills to communicate in a civilized way and rather preferred to rely on their threatening lawyer-lingo. I leave the final judgement up to you.

Anyway, I now concentrate on my other endeavors, among them my collaboration with SwissGroove webradio which reflects the spirit of “My Jazz World” by constantly exploring new music from all parts of the world covering a broad range of music styles. This gives me an outlet to share some gems from my vinyl collection legally and contribute to the good cause of spreading the word about music that deserves to be heard.

You will always be able to reach me by e-mail, thanks for visiting!

I found a legal way to contribute out-of-print music to the community to listen to – by participating with an outstanding webradio called SwissGroove. After the closedown of my blog, the good folks at SwissGroove contacted me and invited me to contribute to their radio. Although SwissGroove plays a mix of jazz, funk, world, r&b/soul and nu-grooves, there is enough room at this radio for some rare grooves to put some spice into the mix. The radio is officially licensed, so you will be able to hear the best music from my vinyl collection as part of their mix legally. The drawback is the fact that you won’t be able to download the music and get further background information, but the music is allowed to get out there – which is my main goal. So tune in to SwissGroove and have fun!

I have been running this blog for the love of music and the preservation of the art form for quite a while now. My visitors included musicians, students, producers, and music aficionados from all over the world. Many people have expressed their gratitude for my work and have discovered lots of great music here that otherwise would have been forgotten and neglected. By strictly concentrating on out-of-print material and offering to remove any post at the request of the copyright holder, I considered myself on the safe side.

Currently I am under a legal attack from the attorneys of Chuck Mangione’s management. Despite the fact that a long-standing petition has been asking for the re-release of his back catalog, the label never felt the need to fulfill those wishes nor announce plans of a re-release, reasons why this blog has stepped in to fill the void by making those albums available digitally. Today, I was asked to immediately remove all the Mangione posts and now face a threat to compensate alleged losses. It saddens me that we cannot communicate in a civilized manner – a friendly mail from Chuck would have done the trick – and instead have to employ the service of lawyers.

Without awaiting any further development of this case, I decided to close down “My Jazz World”. I live a happy and active life where music plays a big part, but I have many other interests to pursue and don’t need any legal hassles to deal with. I don’t have to run this blog at all, I don’t make any money from it, my only reward are the enthusiastic responses from my visitors. So I decided to call it quits and assume a low profile from now on.

Thanks to everyone who sent me records for publication on the blog. Those people can still reach me at my e-mail address and I will make sure that they will receive their digitized music back. For all the others, thanks for visiting, we had a good time as long as it lasted. I’m out!

Many people seem to struggle with the proper reproduction of LP sleeves, so I decided to write a tutorial explaining one way to achieve excellent results.

The main problem is the fact that LP sleeves don’t fit even on a large A3 scanner. Maybe there are scanners that are able to accomodate a record sleeve, but they must be very expensive because of their oversize. I am aware that scanning the cover in two passes and later stitching it together with some suitable software would be an alternative, but I personally prefer the “old school way” using my camera to do the job. There are several aspects that have to be taken care of.

Light: Record covers tend to reflect light. A flash provokes ugly reflections and therefore has to be avoided. Natural light usually gives uneven results, so best is to use a studio setting. Just check a site like Adorama or B&H to find some light stands and studio lights, I have two lights set up about 4 feet to the left and right of the cover, this gives me an evenly lit cover without any reflections. Just experiment and move your lights until you get the desired result. I usually shoot at night or with the blinds closed.

Camera: I use a DSLR (Nikon D300s) with a prime lens (50mm), avoid zoom lenses because they are soft in the corners and produce more distortion. I put the camera on a tripod and aim it straight down to the floor. This avoids motion blur and gives me reproducible results. Make sure that the axis of the lens is perpendicular to the floor and that the cover is right at the center of the finder, this avoids distortions and makes it later easier to work on the picture on the computer. I stop the lens down (f/8) to get some depth of field, so even a warped cover is sharply reproduced. I set the white balance to tungsten and put a white sheet of paper next to the cover, this allows me to correct any color shift later.

Image manipulation: I import the jpg files into the computer and work on them with Adobe Photoshop Elements 3, my favorite application for image manipulation. First I use the “Auto Color Correction” command to set the white balance correctly, if necessary, I use the white sheet of paper on the image to eliminate any color shift with the “Remove Color Cast” function. Then I crop the image with the shift key depressed, thanks to my set up, I usually get pretty square reproductions of the covers, so there is not much additional work required. If there are some distortions, I use the “Skew” command to make the picture perfectly square before I crop it. Then I use the “Clone Stamp Tool” to eliminate blemishes, most of all I take care that all the corners are perfect. Additionally, I often use the “Auto Contrast” command. I save the image with the “Save For Web” command, quality setting high, size 700×700 pixels.

Hope this little tutorial helps those who want to make great pictures of record sleeves.

When I was a teenager I amassed an LP collection of 2000+ records, which now would enjoy sought after collectors’ status. With the advent of the CD, I lightheartedly parted with my collection, expecting most of it to be re-released on CD, which unfortunately didn’t materialize as expected. After a hiatus of 20 years exclusively listening to CDs I have returned to collecting LPs again. I made this move not because I love LPs (I think they pose many problems) but because of all the great music available in this format, which probably never will be re-released on CD and that I want to have in my collection again. Still, if an album is available on CD, I preferably will buy it on CD, but if it isn’t available (yet) digitally, I now am prepared to buy it on LP. This decision has opened the door to lots of exciting and beautiful music, but on the other hand posed several problems which had to be overcome in order to achieve a satisfying listening experience. Thanks to current technology it now is possible to get the most out of those old crackling discs and actually enjoy the music on them in a rather pure form. Read on…

With the goal to re-build an LP collection I found eBay to be a great resource, but you have to know your way around it. Almost every album imaginable sooner or later turns up there, often being sold eventually at steep prices with collectors fighting for rare albums. So you have either to have lots of funds, or at least plenty of time and persistence to continue your search until you get lucky. An additional cost factor are the shipping costs of LPs which are very high due to the fact that records are large and heavy, often exceeding the cost of the LP! So I try to combine several LPs from a vendor to keep costs down.

At the beginning I made the mistake to not pay due attention to the condition of the LP and bought a few duds which now have to be replaced with mint copies. The grading system is not entirely consistent so you have to check the explanations how records are graded at each vendor, usually a record which is mint (M), near mint (NM) or excellent (EX) is fine, everything else is just downhill from there and should usually be skipped. Especially the category very good (VG) has to be approached with caution, because – depending on the grading system used – a record which is VG++ is okay, while VG+ is just acceptable and VG is actually bad. A record graded good (G) is for the trash bin (at least in my opinion). So watch out when buying records and rather pass a chance than wasting money on a record that turns out to be unusable. On the other hand, when you encounter a truly mint copy, then be prepared to pay a few $ more. This way you get the appropriate material to work with in order to get a good digital transfer. The rule is “garbage in, garbage out” so you better make sure you get a pristine copy of the record you want to digitize!

With my ears used to the crystal clear sounds of the CD I had to find a way to deal with the problem of cracks, clicks and pops which plagues even LPs in the best possible condition, let alone those who have some signs of use (or abuse). After you have adhered to the principle to only buy mint, excellent or at least VG++ records, you employ the next step in your home – a good record cleaning machine! Despite the fact that many vendors clean the records before they sell them, it is always a good idea to do this yourself properly and carefully once more when you get them. I have a Hannl Mera cleaning machine which puts some cleaning fluid on the record, scrubs the record and then vacuums it all off again. After this procedure, which has to be repeated on each side of the record, the LP is put in an antistatic sleeve and is left to dry for at least another 24 hours, before you are allowed to play it.

Get yourself a good turntable with the best needle you can afford, attached to a dedicated phono pre-amp. You either attach the pre-amp to the line-in jack of your computer, or – as I do – employ a separate A/D-converter to get the best possible result and use a digital connection to feed the audio into your computer. It depends on your computer how you can connect audio to it, I use a MacPro which gives me all I need. Good cables are certainly an issue too!

Then you have to use an application to capture the audio feed, on the Mac I use two (Bias Peak LE and Sound Studio), which give me the possibility to record an LP and edit an other audio file at the same time, this way saving me time. You have to take care to avoid clipping i.e. the audio signal should stay approximately -6dB below the maximum. You can later correct that by maximizing the audio file.

Once you have the audio file (usually in the AIFF or WAV file format) on your hard disk, which preferably has several hundreds GB of space available, you have to employ what I call “the secret weapon”. People have been wondering about the quality of my rips which are very clean and almost free of clicks and pops. Here is how I achieve it – I use a piece of software called ClickRepair. I have been experimenting with several others before (among them SoundSoap, which learns the noise and filters it out), only to find out that the audio is heavily degraded with these filters and loses a lot of quality in the process, a fact which was not acceptable to me. For a while I edited the sound wave by hand and cleared each click with the pen tool, but had to give up because it was too time consuming. Reading about ClickRepair in a recent issue of Macworld prompted me to try it out – and life hasn’t been the same ever since! ClickRepair uses a different approach, it uses a mathematical algorithm to analyze the sound wave. When a click is encountered it is removed and the sound wave is reconstructed by comparing the wave form before and after the click. This way only clicks are removed without touching the wave form yielding results which border on magic! I was able to transfer some badly scratched records to almost pristine audio. Even mint records have a certain amount of background noise, which is completely eliminated by ClickRepair. This way a record sounds like a CD in the end, maybe even better, because the audio is not taken from a master tape which may have degraded over time. ClickRepair is the software that takes LPs to the digital age and I cannot praise it enough. By the way ClickRepair is available for Windows and Linux also.

After the initial AIFF or WAV file has been cleaned from clicks and pops with ClickRepair, with the help of Bias Peak LE, I split it into the individual tracks by setting markers and exporting those parts of the audio to separate windows. I then insert silence in front of each song and apply a short fade in to make the beginning of the song less abrupt, I also apply a nice fade out and then normalize the file to get the full dynamic range of the song. This way I create a song which starts and ends with digital silence and yet moves smoothly in and out of it. I number the files and put them into a folder on my hard disk, which you either can burn to CD using an appropriate application (Roxio’s Toast Titanium would be a good choice on the Mac) or you can skip this step and store the files directly on your hard disk. In the latter case, regular backups of your music collection are essential.

Either from the burnt CD, or from the stored files on the harddisk, the music is imported into iTunes (I prefer to use the Apple Lossless format here), then I type in all the song names, album title, year of release and genre, doing my best to avoid typos!

I add the cover art, taken with my digital camera, edited with Adobe Photoshop Elements, in a resolution of 700 x 700 pixels. If you need a printed cover, then you can achieve this with iTunes (setting “single cover”), for this purpose I make a playlist with the title of the album, move all the songs in it, and then hit the print button.

Ok, I am a perfectionist and I guess not everyone is willing to spend the time and the funds to realize such a technical solution. But for very little money you can improve your vinyl rips tremendously – by using ClickRepair, which costs $35 only.

I hope you find this tutorial useful.