Scientists Play World's Oldest Commercial Recording 105
sciencehabit writes "The scratchy, 12-second audio clip of a woman reciting the first verse of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star doesn't sound like much. But the faint, 123-year-old recording—etched into a warped metal cylinder and brought back to life after decades of silence by a three-dimensional (3D) optical scanning technique—appears to belong to the first record intended for sale to the public. Made for a talking doll briefly sold by phonograph inventor Thomas Edison, the early record is the oldest known American recording of a woman's voice and may be the oldest known record produced at Edison's laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey."
Re:Now in a 123 yrs will they be able to recover m (Score:4, Informative)
No one in their right mind wants to recover anything with "microsoft" in the name.
Re:Now in a 123 yrs will they be able to recover m (Score:2, Informative)
ADPCM WAV is stupidly easy to decode. The WAV-RIFF container is well documented. ADPCM stands for adaptive differential pulse-code modulation which means it's just pulse code modulation but instead of storing the wave-form (like in raw PCM) it stores the differential. The adaptive part just means that you can scale the size of samples who's differential you are calculating. It's just basic compression techniques applied to PCM wrapped in a very straight forward header. Your only issue is going to come from the zip disks.
Re:URL for MP3 recording (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.nps.gov/edis/photosmultimedia/talking-doll-record-hear-the-recording.htm [nps.gov]
That's good, except that page contains a Flash-based mp3 player. If you really want to listen to the mp3, follow this link: http://www.nps.gov/media/ner/avElement/edis-tenhp_edison_c_E-821-8_edis-1279_20110523_minus-5-semitones-and-eqd.mp3 [nps.gov]