Trying Out A New Toy
A couple weeks back, I bought a Griffin iMic for my TiBook. I'd been looking for a way to start digitizing various items from my record collection off-and-on for a few years. The iMic came recommended and at a decent price for something I may not use all that often. I finally hooked it up over the weekend and picked an old favorite 7" for the first trial, "Blacklisted" by Mac McCaughan's Slushpuppies.
Recording with Final Vinyl wasn't too bad... but editing with Audacity (to get nice fade-ins and to delete a couple of nasty surface crackles) took a long time. Total time to get a 3:40 song settled into MP3 format was about 35 minutes, and the processing completely annihilated my aging battery.
If anyone has tips on speeding up the process (or other cheap/free and effective software), I'm all ears. To be fair, I actually like the level of control Audacity offers -- it just wasn't always intuitive to get in there and tweak. It's also been nearly ten years since I spent any time working in audio (specifically, with the old 2-track predecessor to ProTools).
Anyway, the Slushpuppies 2x7" is long out of print -- I'm guessing it was a run of about 1500 copies, done in 1991, for a band that had already been broken up for a couple years. There are some interesting discussions going on at the U.S. Copyright Office about a formal policy on "orphan works," i.e. photos and films and compositions where the work might still be protected by copyright (since term equals "life of author + 70 years") but the author or copyright owner is unknown. A related discussion is taking place around out-of-print works, where the original copyright owner no longer has an interest in keeping the material in print.
Rereading the paragraph above, I've managed to convince myself that sharing "Blacklisted" from this site, without first clearing it by Merge, would be a likely copyright violation. I've theoretically violated three different exclusive rights of copyright holders (preparation of derivative work, reproduction, distribution) if I make the file available.
There should be some semblance of fair use around sharing works that are no longer in print or otherwise available (like libraries). Anyone care to help start an on-line music library to collect the rambling, shambling artifacts of misspent youth? Would a private digital library cover us, or do we need additional legal cover (since I'm not thinking about streaming MP3s)?
This is why I haven't started MP3 blogging (well, that and lack of time). I'm super-paranoid about violating copyright, and since I have an eye on IP law, I don't want even a blemish on the Character & Fitness bar evaluation. There are valid arguments to be made for MP3 blogging and file sharing as marketing tools - ask the Arcade Fire or Clap Your Hands Say Yeah how they've benefitted - but as long as it's technically illegal, I won't be uploading anything without the copyright holders' permission.
What I'd like is the digital equivilent of a great college radio library: a combination of time-tested favorites and unknown gems waiting to be rediscovered.