Sunday, May 11, 2008

"Vinyl Cutter Etches Music Grooves onto Unwanted CDs"

from wired.com - By Eliot Van Buskirk
 
Aleks Kolkowski has discovered a new use for old CDs: repurposing them into vinyl-style records that can be played on any record player. Attendees of the Manchester Futuresonic 2008 Festival were invited to bring their unwanted CDs and DVDs to his display at the event to have music physically etched onto them by Kolkowski's vintage vinyl cutter. Even better, he apparently let people bring their own WAV files so that they could have whatever song they wanted cut onto the disc.

The resulting CDs are sort of like a DIY version of the vinyl CDs we spotted in November. Drop them onto any turntable that has a 45 RPM speed and these CDs will play a vinyl-ish version of the WAV file. They aren't going to sound as good as high-quality vinyl records, but it's a neat trick.

I've heard more than one person say that they think the future of music formats belongs to digital files and vinyl records. If that's the case, this technique could become a lot more popular.