My Dad has just spent some time recording some of his LP’s to a digital format on his PC. Cue the finding of a record deck, then the purchasing of new needles, then a pre-amp, then the right cables etc etc etc. He has gotten it working now and soon I’ll be able to download all the songs of Rabbie Burns at my leisure.

However it seems that technology is ahead of him. A guy named Ofer Springer decided to see if he could optically scan a vinyl record (on a flatbed scanner) and digitally ‘record’ from the image, to extract the music (via some clever decoding software): Digital Needle – A Virtual Gramophone.

Fascinating.