A new generation discovers the wonder of playing 45 RPM singles at the 33 1⁄3 RPM album speed

Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/09/08/a-new-generation-discovers-the.html

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A lot of YT videos let you control the speed of the playback. The sound gets a little funky, what with artefacting and all, but it’s fun- and lets you do this with almost any music hosted on there. :slight_smile:

And this is why most of my music is lossless encoded.

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Ah yes, proving again the truth of Kerouac’s observation:
“No generation is new. All is vanity.”

Wait till they discover the Chipmunks! Time for a gritty reboot perhaps.

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Growing up I had it even better. Our piece-of-furniture-record-player (similar to something you saw on Mad Men) still played 78s as well as 33s and 45s. So I could take singles and Chipmunk them out. It got really meta when I would take my favorite BeeGees 45s of the day and amp the falsetto even higher via the 78 setting.

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Anyone here remember 16rpm speeds? Quite a few turntables offered that speed back when, but actually finding something recorded at that was rare. I can only remember seeing one album (no idea what it was now), but playing things at that speed was fun for seconds at a time!

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For better or worse, there’s no pitch shifting when you speed up a video on youtube… and at least to me, that’s half the fun.

See e.g. this old xmas classic, as previously seen here on BB:

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The glitchyness when changing speeds on YT has nothing to do with the encoding. That’s caused by the pitch shifting they use to keep the pitch the same when changing the speed.

Losslessly encoding music is useful if you want to work on it, because repeately compressing will create artefacts, but for pure listening it’s just a waste of diskspace.

read here and educate yourself. (And save some diskspace).
https://xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

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Does using something like Mixxx count?

Besides that, the FLACs I use are a copy of my backups and I have plenty of disk space (I use 300GB for about five weeks of audio, not all of it is music admittedly). I use AAC on my Sansa Fuze and anywhere else that doesn’t have much space.

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Ah yes, but where art the apps for playing MP3s backwards? How can we find the critical hidden “I buried Paul” messages of post-vinyl generations?

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Barracuda at 78rpm was my jaaaaaaammm.

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Yes! We must expose backward masking to a new generation before it is too late!

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that was my secret pleasure some years ago listening to the walkman
and the batteries sometimes ‘show-you-the-way’

let alone that ‘wow and flutter’ in production

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Just wait until they discover going backwards, only to hear subliminal satanic messages for the first time!

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I’ve been doing this since I discovered the change speed function in audacity ages ago. Although I usually use -15% or -30% speed instead of using the rpm references. Some sound really cool at a different speed.

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Yes. And we could go with a timeless design

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But if you do pitchshift, you can turn Justin Bieber into the Cocteau Twins:

My favourite 45 at 33 was “Bela Lugosi’s Dead”. I can’t listen to it at full speed anymore, it sounds too frantic.

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Very off-topic, but:

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I remember playing the Supremes " You Keep Me Hanging On" at 33 1/3, and they became… Vanilla Fudge! I suppose you could also play VF at 45 and turn them into the Supremes.

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The “wonder” of it. Meh. I still do this accidentally if I (ever so rarely) play a 12" single, which are sometimes 33s and sometimes 45s and not always clearly marked either way. It’s annoying, is what it is.

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