As an Edinburgh resident I found one record interesting:

I'm curious to learn about the history of "Methven Simpson", and whether H.M. The King did ever visit Edinburgh to buy a pianola. I visited "83 Princes St" and it is now a shared office facility. Maybe there's a Steinway piano hidden in there still that someone has forgotten about?

The rest of this post is a "reminder of how I did it" to setting up the radio station, so is for reference rather than reading.

I used my Tascam DR07 digital audio recorder to record to SD card. I recorded at 24bit resolution. The dynamic range of 78 records is probably only a few bits, but I thought 24 bits would potentially give me more freedom to adjust gain if necessary.

I experimented by connecting the recorder directly to the output of the phono cartridge, and applied the RIAA curve correction in Audacity. (Effect/EQ and Filters/Filter curve EQ) then select 'RIAA' from 'Factory presets' in 'Presets and settings' within the dialog.

I think this possibly produced better results than using the built-in phono pre-amp but it's hard to tell. I reverted to using the built in pre-amp as this meant I could listen to the records as they were recorded.

Some of the records had quite noisy 'pops' and scratches. The background "sausages frying" sound is part of the appeal of these old 78s, so I didn't want to make them too clean.

Using Audacity:

• Remove the audio at the beginning, end and middle by highlighing the section and deleting.
• Effect/Volume/Amplify to normalise the gain.
• Sometimes remove bad click manually by removing a few samples of audio (Click removal removes the 78 sound so I didn't use this.)

Using Audacity:

• Analyse/Label sounds (Sometimes had to adjust with the settings to get clean breaks)
• Sometimes I had to create a new label - use Edit/Labels/Add at selection. Other times I had to delete labels, using Edit/Labels/Label editor.
• Check the beginnings of labels manually as sometimes the beginning is missed with the automatic labelling.
• I then used 'Edit/Labels/Label Editor' to name the tracks - Replace "Track 10" etc in labels with the track names as printed on the sleeve.
• I then export the files using File/Export audio… Select Export range: multiple files as FLAC.
• Load the files into Musicbrainz Picard. Add artist/title/catalog number/image

To save on storage space on the server I compressed the files using the OPUS codec. Installing the 'parallel' tool lets me use all cores of my Macbook at once - and the compression takes hardly any time:

parallel opusenc --bitrate 160 {} "{.}.opus" ::: ./*.flac

(At the time of writing the server re-encodes this to MP3; I figured this might have better compatiblity than the newer OPUS codec - so in retrospect it might be better to encode to MP3 so the server doesn't have to re-encode. The quality of these old records is hardly enough to have to worry about the quality loss in this re-encoding step however).

The radio station is hosted on a shared Debian Linux server; I added its own name to my 'pointinthecloud.com' domain.

I pretty much followed these instructions in the Linux journal article to set up streaming: I used icecast as a streaming server, and liquidsoap randomly select files, and sends them to icecast for distribution.

Install the software:

apt install icecast2 liquidsoap

The server listens on port 8000, so needs a firewall rule. It runs as its own user - so add both of these:

ufw allow 8000/tcp
adduser radiomusic

Copy the music from my Macbook to the server using scp into

/home/radiomusic/music

…ensuring it is readable by user 'radiomusic'

Make a file /home/radiomusic/radio.liq:

# Random playlist from folder
music = playlist(mode="random", reload_mode="watch", "/home/radiomusic/music")

safe_music = fallback(track_sensitive=false, [music,blank()])

# Stream to Icecast
output.icecast(
  %mp3(bitrate=128), # Output format: MP3 @ 128 kbps
  host = "localhost",
  port = 8000,
  password = "put a random password in here",
  mount = "stream",
  name = "PastFM",
  description = "My grandparents records",
  safe_music
)

Finally, start the server. I should set up a systemd service, but for now I used run:

liquidsoap radio.liq

…in 'tmux'

Go to the URL http://<server>:8000/stream and enjoy the music!

I think I will share the URL of the station here eventually. I believe that most of these records are so old they are out of copyright, but want to double check first.