The Orange Juice Symphony gets a new life

My neighbor brought me a favorite CD to listen to. It turned out to be an old symphony performance that had been transferred, in some unknowable past, from a 78 rpm vinyl record. You could hear the needle hitting dust. The loud parts were distorted by clipping. Ahh, here was a challenge.

The disk was simply labeled "Concierto de Aranjuez, Joaquin Rodrigo." It was an orchestral piece that featured a Spanish Guitar soloist. It was alternately melancholy and spirited. It deserved better treatment.

In retrospect, there are some perfectly wonderful recordings of this work floating around. EMI sells one with Placido Domingo conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra and you can also get Louis Fremaux, also conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra, from Sony. But no, none of that pre-baked stuff for this boy. This was probably something different and older and of historical importance.

I've chosen a segment that begins with a quiet stretch, which reveals the vinyl noise, and moves into a strident burst of enthusiasm that is too loud and thus distorted. Also, there is clearly some 50-cycle hum, especially in the right channel. That marks it as coming from Europe -- maybe England. Maybe this is the performance that ended up on EMI Classics - Simon Rattle conducting the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra with Julian Bream on guitar. Well, that's enough to start with. Let's have a go.

Outsourcing to an off-shore contractor

Several weeks ago, I accepted a job from an instructional media developer in Mumbai, India. He said that he had 2.5 hours of recording that needed to have background noise removed. He even provided a brief sample clip of audio. Easy peasy. I bit. It turned out that the audio was actually embedded in 23 separate video files. Whatcha gonna do?

So, I stocked up on Cheetos and Diet Coke, kissed the family goodbye and locked my door. It would have been one thing to sample the ambient noise, turn the De-noise module loose and go pet the cat while I watched cartoons. Instead, I was going to have to extract the audio, process all 23 files separately, put everything back together, return them and, finally, find a distant mountaintop from which to contemplate the condition of my karma. I ended up consuming 82.5 GB of disk space on this sucker (and more hours than I care to admit). Note to self: If the requirements are ambiguous, double your quote.

Here's the first 20 seconds.What do you hear?