IRENE seeks to digitize, preserve fragile recordings

Granted, it's no Commodore 64, but the Library of Congress is yet again warming up to modern technology in order to save some of its most precious at-risk recordings from decades (or longer) ago. Dubbed IRENE (Image, Reconstruct, Erase, Noise, Etc.), the system was created by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to help preservationists "rapidly convert 78 rpm shellac and acetate discs" to digital form, and it is slated to also "remove debris and extraneous sounds that contribute to the deterioration of recordings." The next step in the sound restoration project is to create a fetching system that is simplistic enough for employees to understand and utilize, and we suspect the RAID vendors are already lining up to provide the terabytes exabytes of storage that will likely be needed.

[Image courtesy of IRENE]

[Kroc Camen @ Jun 19th 2007 8:12AM]

Speaking of the Commodore 64, check out the details of the "Stone Oakvalley's Authentic SID Collection" http://www.6581-8580.com/ an automated system of two C64's hooked up to a PC, recording 24/7 for several months converting 30'000 C64 tunes into MP3s!

[Phil Ringsmuth @ Jun 19th 2007 8:16AM]

What's the RIAA going to say about this?

[cmonkey @ Jun 19th 2007 6:07PM]

Nothing at all. Almost everything recorded on 78s has since entered the public domain.

[tim @ Jun 19th 2007 9:37AM]

Exabytes? I thought petabytes came next...

[anonymous @ Jun 19th 2007 10:48AM]

to store the amount of data will go way beyond pedabytes so it was skipped.