Hi folks! Once again requesting that all those old "Not on site" articles be made available in some kind of collected form. I'm sure they are on record, somewhere, back issues sitting in a few cardboard boxes in a back closet somewhere. There is enormous trade in old synthesizers. Old reviews would certainly come in handy. If MAD magazine, the National Geographic, Scientific American, and The New Yorker can make the contents of all their previous issues available on DVD, surely there must be something in it for SOS. When I need information on a synthesizer, I come to SOS and the Vintage Synth Explorer. Sometimes SonicState if you don't have anything on it. Would there be enough interest to warrant the trouble? Why don't you just ask? Run a reader poll: how many readers would like the opportunity to buy a DVD of all the old issues for some nominal fee to be determined by extrapolation from the number and type of responses?

I would be interested if all the collected issues of SOS were made available again. You may choose only one Yes No

Votes accepted from (11/09/11 12:00 AM) to (No end specified) View Poll results

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Future creator of the Singing Brain.

Yes, and the SOS guys have repeatedly said they'd like to do it, but it requires a massive amount of work, and not much commercial gain, and they'd rather spend the resources on the current magazine.

Scans of the magazine are fairly easy to do, and would be useful, but not ideal, and the effort of getting those articles into a properly organised and metadata'd form is substantial.

Would it not be a task that could be farmed out to the community?.. you could then have a requests list and an upload area..
I'm sure a meta-data tagged PDF would be within the abilities of most of the people on here and could be uploaded to a database on the forum.
It would be a great resource and something that would obviously provide additional value to the site



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MBP 17", PC 100(Nubus Protools) Motu 896, X-Station, Logic9, Reason6, Korg legacy, ACE, Alchemy, Emax II, E-Synth, Evolver MEK, Waldorf Pulse and Blofeld, AS Telemark, AS Leipzig-S

Indeed, it has already been discussed here: http://www.soundonsound.com/forum/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=896394&page=3&v iew=collapsed&sb=5&o=365&fpart=1#896394

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SOS Web Editor, Support & Social Media
Friend SOS on Facebook | Follow SOS on Twitter

Dear all,

We've been discussing how best to proceed with getting the early SOS content up onto the SOS website, as we all agree it would be a very nice-to-have and useful addition to the site. The problem we have here is that we simply can't spare any effort to tackle this project at the moment because we are fully committed to a variety of other back office and web update projects.

However, if some of you are prepared to back up your earlier offers, I've been asked to coordinate a trial project with any willing volunteers here to find out how practical it would be to 'farm out' the scanning element of the process.

So, what I need to get the ball rolling are some willing volunteers with a resonably decent A4 size flat bed scanner, a collection of early SOS magazines, and a willingness to break their spines (those of the magazines -- not your own! ) to ensure that the scans are undistorted and without a centrefold shadow. You'll also need a sheet of black card to place behind the scanned page to prevent show-through of the text and images on the reverse side. I'm afraid we can't offer any financial remuneration, but you'll get a lovely warm glow from helping out!

I'll provide details of scan format, resolution and file naming conventions to anyone who volunteers. Please contact me directly at hugh.robjohns@ the usual soundonsound address, and put 'SOS Scans' in the subject line. If you can also provide a list of the issues you have available to scan, that would help too.

hugh

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Technical Editor, Sound On Sound

Bump

Any volunteers?

Hugh

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Technical Editor, Sound On Sound

Bump again...

Come on guys, put your scanners where your mouths are! Anyone seriously interested in making the missing early issue archive a reality?

Hugh

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Technical Editor, Sound On Sound

Hi Hugh!

I suspect the problem is that the people reading this post are going to be the ones who don't have access to the old issues, since the ones that do don't need the reprints


Martin

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YewTreeMagic

or, like me, have no intention of breaking the backs of their collection that starts at issue 1

Or like me, who, when last moving toadstools, offered my complete collection from issue 1 to the SOS offices, but nobody seemed to want to collect, so in the bin they went!

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An Eagle for an Emperor, A Kestrel for a Knave.

Quote The Elf:

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Or like me, who, when last moving toadstools, offered my complete collection from issue 1 to the SOS offices, but nobody seemed to want to collect, so in the bin they went!

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Nooooooooo...

Quote The Elf:

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Or like me, who, when last moving toadstools, offered my complete collection from issue 1 to the SOS offices, but nobody seemed to want to collect, so in the bin they went!

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Damn!

I kept all my SOS issues that weren't on the website and binned the rest, but it's not that many alas (and hence I'd be interested in digging into those issues that I never had before, especially as that period is actually a really interesting one in terms of electronic music, the explosion of home recording, MIDI, digital synthesis, samplers, the rise of computer software and so on.)

The spine thing is a PITA - I don't like killing my magazines to scan them, so it makes the scanning process a little more tricky and slower than it otherwise would be to get clean scans. But I might be willing to tackle my SOS collection to get those scanned at least, next time I get back to my collection. I'll look into it...

There's some really interesting stuff in the older issues... I found an article on 'Surviving the Millenium Bug!' a while back, and another one about how Maplin had started an online ordering service, with steps on how to configure your modem, including baud rates, disabling your 'call waiting' service, etc.

Quote Martin Walker:

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I suspect the problem is that the people reading this post are going to be the ones who don't have access to the old issues, since the ones that do don't need the reprints

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There maybe something in that... and yet every now and then we see requests for the back issues interspersed with people offering to help by scanning their collections.

SOS does have it's own complete archive, of course, and with multiple copies of many issues... but not all. For obvious reasons SOS doesn't want to destroy the unique archive issues, but to achieve decent scans, that's exactly what is needed.

Of course, once everything is scanned the on-line versions will be of far more practical use than the paper copies, but we just need to hurdle that problem of getting the original mags scanned. When that's done we can run them an OCR process so that everything becomes searchable which is where we'd like to be.

But the scanning is hugely time-consuming on its own, let alone the time needed to correct OCR mis-reads, and to proof every page, sort out relevant metatag details etc. It's a very big task that SOS simply can't afford to do at the moment.

That's why I was hoping to start a trial with outside help to get the ball rolling, but it seems the ball is well and truly glued down ight now!

Hugh

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Technical Editor, Sound On Sound

Quote Korff:

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There's some really interesting stuff in the older issues... I found an article on 'Surviving the Millenium Bug!' a while back, and another one about how Maplin had started an online ordering service, with steps on how to configure your modem, including baud rates, disabling your 'call waiting' service, etc.

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Oi! - I wrote that feature on surviving the millennium bug

It was a hot topic back then , since scaremongering had left many PC users rather confused over whether or not it would crash their machine, scramble their existing data, or turn their beloved computer into a smouldering heap of charred remains


Martin

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YewTreeMagic

Quote Martin Walker:

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crash their machine, scramble their existing data, or turn their beloved computer into a smouldering heap of charred remains

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Didn't the next Windows do that? It certainly made me kick my PC a couple of times.

On a related issue (on topic, that is), why are there no CD/DVD-ROM versions of anything pre-'98?

Quote nathanscribe:

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On a related issue (on topic, that is), why are there no CD/DVD-ROM versions of anything pre-'98?

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For the same reason that there are no digitally archived articles available?

You'd need to have them digitised before a CD/DVD-ROM could be created


Martin

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YewTreeMagic

Ah, but there are articles online dating from Jan '94 that are text only. Clearly there is digitized content, yet the material between Jan'94 and Dec '97 is not available to purchase except as individual articles in PDF format (as far as I'm aware). I was just wondering what was the cause. I'm sure there's a good reason, it's just a shame I can't have everything.

Quote Off duty BBQ lighter AKA Idris:

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or, like me, have no intention of breaking the backs of their collection that starts at issue 1

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How about this approach?

Not suggesting you spend time doing it... I know you're a busy guy... but if there are people with the time, inclination and access to a collection, it's *possible* to do a decent scan without breakages!

I've thrown away a large amount of my old copies of SOS when moving abroad, I just could not justify the cost of the moving of several boxes of SOS, Keyboard, etc.

Could SOS provide us with a guideline and template to use, I will get a new scanner soon and start scanning the SOS copies that I still have. Any suggestions for a decent scanner that does not break the bank? Canon, HP ?

Should we use OCR, what resolution, naming convention, etc?

Somehow we need to encode key words, search terms, headlines, etc.

Could SOS provide us with some kind of reward? i.e. an extra month of subscription for each successful scan?



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TritonExtrMOSS/EX800, NordRack2, ATC1, D550/XV5080/MKS70/MKS7/MKS50/MKS80/S550/JP8080/Ju60/JD990, Blofeld, Mopho, TG77/An1X, ESQM, Emax, Esynth, AkaiS5k/MPC1k, Indigo2, Rogue, Machinedrum, ProOne

Quote DePulse:

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Could SOS provide us with a guideline and template to use

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At this stage all that would be required is to generate a full-size 300dpi page image, stored in a loss-less format such as PNG or TIFF. The page will scan better if there is a black card behind it to prevent show-through of whatever is printed on the other side. The page will need to be scanned flat to avoid image distortion from the binding edge, which is why it probbaly required the spine to be cut off! The file naming convention would be year_month_page, so page 35 in the OCtober 1997 edition would be scanned as 1997_10_35.png, for example.

All the OCR, proofing, image correction and generation of keywords, metadata tags and so forth we'll take care of here.

Quote:

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Could SOS provide us with some kind of reward? i.e. an extra month of subscription for each successful scan?

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It's a nice idea... although I'm not sure we could afford a month per page scan. I'm sure we could come up with some form of reward along those genreal lines though... if we get sufficient interest in undertaking the project.

hugh

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Technical Editor, Sound On Sound

It's a nice idea.

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Teaching Assistant

Not an extra month subscription per page scan, I meant one extra month per full magasine scan.


Any tips for a OK scanner?

I used to have a cheap combination scanner/printer and it was horrible to scan with it, very slow and it had to scan the page several times (per color or using some kind of interlace, I don't know). I threw it away.

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TritonExtrMOSS/EX800, NordRack2, ATC1, D550/XV5080/MKS70/MKS7/MKS50/MKS80/S550/JP8080/Ju60/JD990, Blofeld, Mopho, TG77/An1X, ESQM, Emax, Esynth, AkaiS5k/MPC1k, Indigo2, Rogue, Machinedrum, ProOne

Can't go wrong with any modern USB scanner by a reputable manufacturer really; eg Canon...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Canon-CanoScan-LiDE-110-Scanner/dp/B00400OK3O/ref= sr_1_17?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1319102927&sr=1-17

...or Epson...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/HP-ScanJet-G2410-Flatbed-Scanner/dp/B0014DE0G2/ref =pd_cp_computers_4