Here I am, pleased that I have a much better database than I had previously. I’ve removed a load of silly guesswork on where records should be. I’ve fixed a plain wrong pair from Mike’s Collection. I still need to add all the new ones I’ve found, assuming they are real, to really get all …
Continue reading “SFX Discography Project 13 – Known Unknowns”
In the last post I’d extracted 1720 unique catalogue numbers from the 1985 BBC Sound Effects Catalogue and pasted them into Excel. As well as deduplicating the list I ran quick sort to begin the process of matching up what was in the catalogue with what I had in my list. Spot D Mistake I …
Continue reading “SFX Discography Project 12 – Catalogue Extraction pt. 3 – Counting Up”
After a brief introduction to Regular Expressions last time it’s time to actually scan the 1985 BBC Sound Effects Catalogue and turn it into a text file. Happily, I had already photographed this whole thing in early 2022. That taught me that the OCR task was not at all easy and I put it to …
Continue reading “SFX Discography 11 – Catatlogue Number Extraction pt. 2 – Simple Scanning”
What does this mean to you? The EC and NH are prefixes for Sound Effects Centre catalogue numbers, so that’s a clue. The capital letters are a complete alphabet minus the letters I and O, which is another. Expressed Purpose This is a regular expression. You don’t come across them in everyday programmes like MS …
Continue reading “SFX Discography Project 10 – Catatlogue No. Extraction pt. 1”
Here’s a case study on a BBC Sound Effects record that’s on Discogs with an interesting* note. This is EC 19F, Motor Car: Ford Cortina 1600. https://www.discogs.com/release/7598199-No-Artist-Motor-Car-Ford-Cortina-1600 My interest is aroused by this note about a note. “Notes on paper sleeve from pressing plant which state “PU58, JOB 27422, 150 pressings, 4-3-75” Field recordings made …
Continue reading “SFX Discography Project 9 – Ford Cortina 1600”
Late on in the collating (see previous post) I noticed these two copies of EC 91C – English Church Bells – had different matrix numbers. And I had to sit down to absorb this information. I was rocked back on my heels by this because it means an assumption I had about dating these records …
Continue reading “SFX Discography Project 8 – Matrix Revelations”
The SFX 7” adventure has been on hiatus. I was making steady progress on the automatic cropping of the labels, but hit a bit of a wall with the many things I needed to do basically daunting me a bit, whereupon I lost momentum. Then I got busy on other things and I’ve been needing …
Continue reading “SFX Discography Project 7 – Collections Collated”
Let’s review the steps I’ve worked out so far and add some I haven’t in order to get an overview of how things are coming together. 1 – Deskew Although all the photos will be orientated the same way (up? round?) they all need to be straightened out. The basic approach is to use the …
Magic Tricks? Rather unexpectedly, Magic Select does not take its foreground image untouched. Here you can see the original and Magic Selected image overlaid. I’ve moved the cropped label around to try and line it up with the original, but it’s bigger. I’ve aligned it so you can see the difference clearly. With a bit …
Frustrated with OpenCV and the imperfections of the processes I was using, I decided to see how things worked out using Paint 3D and Power Automate. This was the result. To summarise, I took an initial batch of photos to test out ways of automatically cropping the label of all my BBC SFX 7″ discs. …
