[Dixielandjazz] Restoring old 78 rpm jazz recordings

[Bill Gunter]

Hi all,

In casting about for a topic for my column next month in the American Rag 
about "Jazz on the Internet,"  I came across a web site for a Canadian 
recording engineer who has developed a technique for transferring old 78 to 
digital files and then burning them onto CDs. The result is much cleaner 
recordings than the old 78s (who's got a 78 record player anyway this day 
and age?).

I have transferred a few old recordings to CDs for my own archives and 
certainly do not consider myself professional enough to do such a thing as a 
business venture either for fun or profit. However, it's possible that some 
of you may have developed an interest in this sort of thing.

If you can clean up old 78 jazz records and convert them to digital .wav 
files for burning onto CD, and if you do this on any sort of professional 
(or even amateur) basis for others, would you please contact me and tell me 
about it.

Those of us jazz nuts who would like to archive our old 78s in a convenient 
clean form, playable using digital technology would, I'm sure, be interested 
in techniques for doing it themselves or references to those who do this 
sort of work.

Are there software programs for such purposes that will clean up cracks, 
scratches, clicks, and other strange and unwanted noises and then burn such 
cleaned up tracks onto CDs playable in any CD player?

Thanks in advance for your input on this.

Cheers,

Bill "Archivist" Gunter
jazzboard at hotmail.com