How to Rescue your old 78 RPM Records

Wow, you have a neat old record but no way to play it. It's obviously not published anymore and record companies that know who even owns it may not think it's profitable to put out on CD. Is it lost forever? No, sox saves the day. If you can't find a 78RPM player with reasonable sound quality and phon jacks on the back, you can use your 45 RPM player and the program play to get your tune back. This is a hack and it's not the best thing for your record or your player, but it works.

You will need

  1. Use Krecord to record the record at 45RPM. It will sound funny and slow, but the information is there.
  2. Use Audacity to remove noise from the recording if you want to.
  3. Pull up your favorite command prompt where you saved your file and type "sox -r 76440 your_file.wav -r 44100 outfile_name.wav". What this does is changes the rate of the output file to 78/45 * 44100 bps. You could do this with the ratio (-c) option, I can't figure out where to round the trailing 1/3.

Play your outfile to see if you like it.