Burn Music On To Anything!

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, and try again. This is especially true when your efforts involve a salvaged record player, a laser cutter, and He-Man. Taking that advice to heart, maniac maker extraordinaire [William Osman] managed to literally burn music onto a CD.

Considering the viability of laser-cut records is dubious — especially when jerry-built — it took a couple frustrating tests to finally see results, all the while risking his laser’s lens. Eventually, [Osman]’s perseverance paid off. The lens is loosely held by a piece of delrin, which is itself touching a speaker blaring music. The vibrations of the speaker cause the lens to oscillate the focal point of the laser into a wavelength that is able to be played on a record player. You don’t get much of the high-end on the audio and the static almost drowns out the music, but it is most definitely a really shoddy record of a song!

Vinyl aficionados are certainly pulling their hair out at this point. For the rest of us, if you read [Jenny’s] primer on record players you’ll recognize that a preamplifier (the ‘phono’ input on your amp) is what’s missing from this setup and would surely yield more audible results.

Let this be a lesson to you: even silly ideas can be awesome and fun despite painful frustration during the process. Using a different kind of laser even allows for pyrite disks to be used as records.

17 thoughts on “Burn Music On To Anything!

  1. Paper records existet when gramophones were wind up, later in the sixties, singles made of single sheet plastic as thin as an overhead slide were common and cheap, my mom had plenty and they sounded horrible even if an ordinary LP was used as backing.

  2. I’ll take the article for face value for now and imagine what the sounds are because:

    Damn it Firefox! Where did I store that windows HDD if I hadn’t destroyed+recycled it and for what laptop did it belong to now???

    Firefox updated to 52 and just done this to me: [link]
    Damn FalseAudio and their laggy*, buggy, user-space rubbish.

    *WTF Failfox developers thinks “laggy” is no longer a word anymore! Sounding like symptoms of SONY syndrome (Mozilla should remove the viewing pane and address bar, they should just have a menu bar and nothing else, no way to browse. Because who needs to browse anyway?).

  3. It might help the sound range if there wasn’t such a radical sweep of the cut– just look at how wild some of those grooves are- no wonder lower frequencies dominate and higher frequencies are lost. Still, very cool.

  4. great work. I appreciate the extent of truthfulness in the video showing how many failed attempts . I ask my students to see this as an inspiration to never give up on good ideas, it takes a lot of hard work to see ones ideas turn to reality! Hats off to you!

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