rhahl wrote: 
Ok.  I've done as much as I can without degrading it as little as I can.  There is so much embedded crackle and groove noise that I could prolly spend a couple of weeks on that manually and accomplish very little.

So here is what I have done to it at this point.  I guess the only way to do an A / B is to have the youtube vid open in one tab and my file open in another tab playing the preview and go back and forth.

CLICKY 

So here is a question for you since you are heavily into finding youtube music and everybody else.

Since y'all are now pretty familiar with my stuff and what it is ... are they worthy of uploading to youtube ?  There's lots of different offerings of these songs I have done already there.  Am I just adding to the clutter, or are they different enough to put up ?

I admit to being a video luddite and have never put anything together.  If I did, about all I could do is put a picture of the album cover up and attach the music file to it.  I know it can't be all that hard, but ...  Obviously, I would want to upload the highest quality version of the file.

Any tips to get it right out of the gate ? 

 rhahl wrote: 
Thanks.  It worked @192 k  such as it is

Cool link btw, bookmarked.

Its on the plate.  I'll get back to you on this.

 

Edit :  Already opened it up and taken a peak.  Someone has already worked on it.  I can see signs.  Done a couple of things.  It will never be great, but maybe I can improve it some.  We'll see.

 kurtster wrote: 
You might be able to download it using this web site: https://www.youtube2mp3.cc/

 miamizsun wrote: 
Honestly, I may have heard this back in the day but it's not registering...

Catchy, though! It reminds me of a buncha bands—Styx, the Eagles, Supertramp, a synth-jazz band with good harmonies whose name I can't recall right now.  Apparently Alan Parsons produced some of their albums and that fits in with what I heard. 

OK: "How Much I Feel" was a song I heard endlessly on FM.  "Biggest Part of Me" is another memory-lane hit—reminds me a bit of a white Earth Wind and Fire.   "You're The Only Woman (You & I)" is another blast from the past—the chorus sounds like Michael McDonald solo (ex-Doobie Brothers IIRC). 

Ambrosia had a good sound! I'll have to see whether they sounded different when they first started out—the hits I'm remembering seem to be from late 70s-early 80s.  

 rhahl wrote: 
Its very interesting. Did some reading and listening to other examples of this kind of music.  Unable to download this video, so I can't really do anything.  Would be willing to give it a try though.  I've learned a lot from trying to work with old stuff..  Not the same thing, but I've got an old Hank Williams Sr song, Lost Highway from the late 40's that I tried from a crappy old mp3 just to see what I could do with it 10 years ago when I first started doing this stuff.  Its interesting.  Might try it again, but I would have to fire up my original music puter which was retired a few years ago, in order to find the source file.  If you can get a file of this song on the video, let me know and I'll give you a way to get it to me and I'll give it a try.

There are many songs that I have done over and over again through the years, trying out new things that I learn, which is now by trial and error as I run into new problems which vinyl is throwing at me.  Time Has Come Today is one of them.  I just went and pulled up the remaster I did 8 years ago from an mp3 source that I settled on as being the best I could do at the time and compared it to my most recent effort.  jeezuz k what a difference.  I'm embarrassed by how bad it is in comparison.    

Chest Fever by The Band is another one I have done over and over again.  Chest Fever has to be one of my all time favorite songs ever and what I focus on in that song is the organ and how it growls and try and fill it out even more without trashing the rest of the song.  The other challenge, like would be in the song from the video above is to filter out the hiss and extraneous noise without taking away too much and bringing back what is left and making it full again.  Its a tricky balancing act.  About 6 months ago while working on some Zeppelin, I found a ringing sound at about 2500 hz that pops up, a lot.  I figured out how to deal with that and with the last round of ripping have found that sound on some other recordings.  The Zeppelin tracks I worked on were CD rips and the new songs I've found it on are from my vinyl rips from different bands, so its not a turntable artifact.  But now I can deal with it, to some degree.  Sibilance is another problem, which is found around 7500 hz.

This past month I've spent all my free time working on the Live At Leeds 3 LP set I just bought.  Even with state of the art pressing for the present times, there were still more pops, clicks and crackle than there should be.  It took me two weeks just to get all of that stuff removed.  Then the challenge was to tweak what was left without screwing it up.  One thing that made it easy and hard at the same time was that although a live concert, it was essentially played on just three instruments the whole time.  There were no guitar changes which is extremely common today.  Townshend played one guitar the entire concert doing all kinds of different songs with Tommy tossed in the middle for S &G's.  So once I figured out what I was going to do, I could apply it to all six sides of the album.  And it worked, after trying 3 different ways on the whole dam fandango and listening to it over and over again on the studio computer, at home on the big rig and then in the car to try and find some sort of happy medium without giving up too much.  And yes, I get tired of hearing the same stuff over and over again and get burned out on it.  But after the recovery period, its still worth it.  (and I love my wife who also ends up listening to this stuff over and over again.  I'm really lucky we like the same music)  Ultimately, while I have tools and goodies to play with all of this stuff, in the end its all done by ear.  They tell me when to stop.  And I'm so thankful to still have enough left to hear pretty well.  Thank ceiling cat for USB thumb drives so I don't have to burn a test CD for the car anymore.  Now I just play the same full tilt wav files in the car as at home.  If anyone's interested in the L A L thing, drop me a pm and I'll send a link when I get it ready.  Something like this is a little too sensitive for a public link.

And just to state why I do this is just to make me happy and smile.  I share it for smiles and feedback.  After all these years I'm now hearing that this stuff sounds pretty good even on low fi stuff.  I have a theory for that.  The cleaner the source, the less work the sound system has to do because its not trying to reproduce all the unintentional distortion that I get rid of.  I dunno, I'm just guessing, I'm no electrical engineer, I'm just an old guy with time on my hands who still loves music and with no one to hand this down to after I'm gone.  So I'll share the best of what I do now and then so others can smile, too.

 y'all

 

This recording might make a worthy project.



It came up in a discussion of odd time signatures at nakedcapitalsim: "The loveliest of all time signatures is the nine-beat Zebekiko (various spellings) bar used in Greek/diaspora Rebetika (many spellings of that too). Endless subtle variations on 4/4/1, 4/5, 5/4, 2/2/2/2/1, 2/2/2/3* etc: elusive and strangely intuitive at once."

 kurtster wrote: 

even most deaf people know this song

if you were alive, and there was an fm radio handy, there was no shelter from it.....

 

 kcar wrote: 
Your welcome.  Yeah it came out pretty good.  The psychedelic section does sound better all cleaned up, I think.  Its now enjoyable rather than something you just wait to be over.  Ambrosia got lots of airplay here in Cleveland back in the day.  They have a few albums.  I have their first three.  This one is their first.  Quality work and musicianship and I do like their sound and many of their songs.  Its original.

I prefer wav for many reasons.  First I work on PC.  Its also the format that the editing works in.  Its completely uncompressed and any computer will play it with little effort, and most importantly, it sounds best, imo.  It will down convert into anything provided you have the software to do so.  Lastly, space is no longer an issue.

 kurtster wrote: 
God bless you, KW! Downloaded the non-RAW version of "Time Has Come Today" and it's banging away right now on my computer. 

This more than makes up for BillG's stubborn decision to stick with the decidedly inferior 4-minute "edited" version on RP (I keep saying this in the song comment section but it really sounds like someone just kicked the turntable and called it day). 

The drums are really rolling and the stereo separation is quite good—and that's just out of my computer's built-in speakers. And now we're into the psychedelic section that Bill calls "laughable" (smh. Yes, Bill, Radiohead played every day is so much better  ). 

Curious: do you prefer the WAV format over ACC or FLAC? Any particular reason?

Not sure I ever heard of Ambrosia before I saw your post, but then again I grew up in MA so maybe they didn't get play there. 

Thanks again, sir!

 

 PFM wrote: 
You're most welcome.  Glad you liked it.

 kurtster wrote: 
Kurtster:

Thanks for investing the time and for sharing. Truly an ear-opening experience! 

 kurtster wrote: 
bump

 kurtster wrote: 
That's very cool.

In my time of over thinking things (which is a lot ) I've recently come to think of audio in the same terms as motion picture film.  Motion pictures are the original digital format if you consider that you are seeing so many individual frames per second that fool the mind into thinking you are seeing a seamless smooth moving image.

While analogue audio truly is seamless, our hearing will also operate the same way as our vision in putting sounds together.  The process of cleaning up rips of both LP's and CD's has taught me this.  The best example of this is scratches, clicks and pops.  There are many ways to remove these, but I prefer to do it with a pencil tool and draw out an individual pop rather than use a program that affects the entire track in a global fashion.  Using a program will usually lead to a noticeable change in the entire sound.  While extremely time consuming, one at a time done manually, if done properly, will make the change undetectable to the listener.

Not too long ago, someone I met wanted to actually hear the before and after of what I do so I put a disc together for him to listen to.  I also put up a folder of the tracks on that disc to share at a site that has a lot of people doing remasters of their own vinyl for a I'll show you mine if you show me your's kinda thing. 

The main attraction was my rip of The Chambers Bros ~ Time Has Come Today from the very first pressing I bought as a kid when it first came out.  It went to more than a few parties and the proof is in the raw rip.  But it cleaned up real nice proving that there can be gold in those beat up grooves.  

Here's some screen prints to illustrate.  The first one is a portion that is about 10 seconds long, with the pops easy to see and there are lots of them.  The song is over 10 minutes long.  The second shows a blow up of the centered section with a 1/10 of a second portion and the clicks.  The third shows the click drawn out with a straight line redrawing the click into no click for a lack of a better way to put it.  It is inaudible upon playback.

 



Awhile ago I wished that I had some Google glasses so that I could record what the process is like in real time while listening to it during the process.  IIRC correctly, it took me a couple of days to draw out all the pops in the song.  Call me crazy.  But the finished product made me smile.

So for anyone interested, the folder with the before and after of Time Has Come Today is available for a short time that also includes side 1 of Ambrosia's first album which never had a major CD release.  The CD's are obscure and out of print already as best as I can tell.  The raw rip of the whole side is there along with the individual tracks remastered.  Ambrosia's first album is one of those albums where one side is truly outstanding and the other side is so so.  Side 1 is outstanding, imho.

Its what I do to keep me smiling and out of trouble.

CLICKY HERE IF YOU LIKE 

 ScottFromWyoming wrote: 
I heard the same thing, too.  Prolly bs rumours from record store owners to keep you coming in.

 kurtster wrote: 
I thought so too. They might have cheated you on liner notes or stuff like that but the record itself was decent. I always heard stuff like they used "worn out" masters etc. but I can't imagine that was really any kind of savings.

 ScottFromWyoming wrote: 
The red label Columbia/CBS pressings have been consistently higher quality over the years.  Another label that was consistently great was Reprise, Sinatra's company, before it got bought by WB.  RCA was always an adventure, you never knew what you were going to get.  Dynaflex, meh ...  Atlantic and Atco were decent, before the WB purchase.  I guess we can rightly blame WB for the demise of vinyl to a certain degree.  The crapiness of so much vinyl made CD's an instant joy.  Now that I'm back into my vinyl, when it was good, it was very, very good.

I have learned so much lately about pressing plants while catalogueing my collection at discogs.  There were pressing plants scattered all over the place back in the day.  It seems that the bulk of the plants were operated by Columbia and they sold press time to different labels when available. Capitol was the other primary presser.  Mastered by Capitol and Sterling are two marks I do look for in the runouts.  It really is mind blowing when you see how many versions of some albums there are.  Going through the list to find the exact one you have can be a lot of work.  Sgt. Pepper for example ...

Truth be told, I have quite a bit of CRC LP's and they are mostly very nice pressings.

 kurtster wrote: 
I remember making buying decisions based on label. Not sure if all CBS-affiliated labels used the same pressing plants, but in the 80s I gave some credit to CBS/Columbia for making New Wave a success. Elvis Costello & the Clash early records were pressed well. 

Warners stuff sometimes was really thin. I got Marshall Crenshaw's first album and it's the only one I ever took back for sounding crappy. The guy let me swap it out but told me the replacement probably wouldn't be any good either because of how thin the thing was (he'd inspected the original to make sure I hadn't damaged it). Thinner vinyl=shallower grooves, I guess. That was the first time someone told me that manufacturers make a difference (and he wasn't just trying to sell me on 180g or something).  

FWIW ...

Since I have been ripping away, I have found that any time I see an orange Epic label, I get excited.  They are consistently the cleanest and quietest US pressings I have had the pleasure of listening to.

or make your own wind powered turntable http://www.popsci.com/build-record-player-powered-by-wind
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