Can you 3d print a record

This video shows the entire record-making process and features some of the audio I've been able to reproduce. The process is broken up into a few steps: audio preprocessing, model generation, and printing. Because the sampling rate of the records is much lower than the typical I also apply RIAA equalization to counteract the frequency response of the phono preamp used during playback. As I programmatically generate a 3D model of a spiral groove wrapping around the surface of a record, I use information contained in the processed audio recording to modulate the depth of the groove.

The resulting model is saved and sent to the printer, where it is converted to a series of layers to print from small droplets of resin.

After one layer of resin is deposited on the print bed, it's cured by a set of bright UV lights and the next layer of resin is deposited on top; this continues until the model is finished printing about layers.

From there, the model is cleaned and can immediately be played on an ordinary turntable. My code takes raw data from a digital recording and uses it to modulate the depth of the record groove to match the original waveform of the song. If you look carefully at the following closeup images, you can see the waveform traced out by the bottom of the groove. The waves are oriented vertically relative to surface of the record and cause the needle to vibrate up and down as it moves across the groove, recreating the original audio signal.

The Connex has impressive resolution of dpi in the x-axis and y-axis, and 16 micron resolution in the z-axis; however, this is still at least an order of magnitude coarser than the level of detail in a traditional vinyl audio disc. Producing the STL data file for the 3D printer required the creation of some custom software to import the raw audio, massage it, convert it to a physical waveform, and generate the overall geometry of the target disc.

The Instructable has complete details for those interested, including background information on how vinyl audio recording works, and a fascinating discussion of the evolution of the project. And, of course, there is plenty enough information to allow you to create your own discs, if you're lucky enough to have access to a 3D printer.

Here's a video showing the final results. As you can tell, the audio quality is nowhere near that of a traditional vinyl disc, but it's still a darned impressive feat:. I figured this would provide me already with a significant improvement of quality from what Amanda had produced. Resolutions were uniform on all 3 axis, XYZ with all parts having an accuracy of 0. This was by far the best printer I could find. The material used was 'Accura Xtreme'. Unfortunately, the machine and vinyl would break before it could be fully printed, the file being far too large.

Files are generraly a few dozens MB at most, and Amanda herself mentions that MB is already pushing it. Doing some further research, I then thought that the model may be using a lot of polygons which are not required to print all the details. I therefore asked Amanda if she thought we could use a technique called decimation to remove useless polygons and therefore make the file lighter, but she confirmed that the program she created was pretty efficient.

Considering how precise vinyls are in terms of geometry, this makes perfect sense. As of today, there therefore doesn't seem to be a way to print even one single song in a decent quality.

The song I used was just below 3mn and in mp3 format. I'm not sure whether there are elements I could have tweaked to change the output type of printer or material used, settings in the file , but it seemed that as of early , we were still a long way to being able to 3D print vinyls from the comfort of our home, or as an alternative manufacturing process to the vinyl plants which was the main goal of my investigation here.

If anyone has tried similar experiences and maybe had better outcomes, I'd love to hear about it. Reply 2 years ago. I am facing the very same issue of the file size. Noting that my printer cannot print a file this large, how can I scale the size down? Did you find a solution to this? Unfortunately no though I haven't looked into it again since At the time, I asked Amanda if the file size was that large because of inefficiencies in the file generation process, but she responded that the script was actually pretty efficient ie no empty spaces in the output file.

The complexity and precision of the grooves on a vinyl seem to make it difficult to reduce the file size by much, so from what I can tell, the best bet is to research what file sizes 3d printers are able to process seemingly nowadays, and see how close you can get to this without impacting quality too much.

Yeah there's not a lot you can do to get the file size down - the detail in the grooves that the code currently spits out was the bare minimum I found that I could get away with without impacting quality. I think the best bet is to process a shorter audio file, which will generate a shorter groove with less geometry. Reply 4 years ago. That's not really for me to answer that.

You might find 3D printing companies that can do it for less with same or better printer specs, I haven't explored this any further since I posted this comment 2 years ago.

That was just for 1 copy though, additional ones were definitely cheaper to make. Reply 6 years ago on Introduction. Don't give up! I managed to get it to work after some trial and error and re-reading the instructions. Most of my problems came about from using different versions of Windows. I found I could only get it to work on my desktop, not my laptop. I represent a national touring band that wants to talk with you about your 3D printed vinyl concept. They want to release plans for people to print a new song for record store day.

I'd love to have a quick chat about how feasible this may be and if you'd ever be interested in working with us? Or perhaps recommending someone to work with as I'm sure you're very busy All the best to you!

Anyone considered producing 78s? I have an old Columbia Disc Gramaphone and a fine selection of Wagner but I'd like to expand my collection! Question 5 months ago.

Hi Amanda, Your printer was xdpi and you put just in your calculations. I have a printer that is x, so what would be the value I need to input? Question 1 year ago. Hi Amanda. I'm about to have a project similar to this one with a lot of inspiration from you and I wondered how important is the UV-resin printer?

I will have the oppertunity to work with 3d printer of hyrell hydra 16 that has 1 micron accuracy, do you think it will be different or how it will effect the result? Thanks a lot! Hi Amanda, this is a fantastic work thanks so much for sharing this it is really inspiring!

I have been trying to follow all the steps and initially i got an OutOfBoundsException managed to sort that one, but now i get an error that says the function first does not exist line I was wondering weather is a library issue or something wrong in the code I am runining procesing 3. I have run this also in processing 2 but get the same error I have run a song of 3mn long and kept a silent space at start and end as suggested in your instructable.

Please refer to the attached image for the snapshot from the processing code. Any help on this matter would be much appreciated. Thank you. Reply 1 year ago.

Hi all, I have sorted it out, it was a bug in the Modelbuilder library. To everyone who might have this issue just download library version Modelbuilder va03 and works with processing 3.

Hi Amanda! This is absolutely amazing. Real life genius stuff right there. Anyway: I've been trying to follow along with the ten steps as best I can, but I've found some of the steps hard to correlate with the options I get - for example, I did not find a 'zip' file. It didn't work, so I re-installed and I also tried this with the 3 previous versions of. I assume this is the sketch I needed to open. However, when I then do the simple process of converting to wav and placing my music file into the correct folder, then running the.

I feel that the failure is either a simple error of mine, or due to the mess of different versions of programmes I'm having to use. ANY advice is very much appreciated!

I hope this message finds you well. Thanks, Amber :. Answer 1 year ago. I apologize for the late response. I found that the solution is that you need to run Python 2, the problem is you're running python 3.

Introduction: 3D Printed Record. By amandaghassaei uh-man-duh-guss-eye-dot-com Follow. More by the author:. About: I post updates on twitter and instagram: amandaghassaei More About amandaghassaei ». Here's a basic overview of my Processing algorithm: use raw audio data to set the groove depth - parse through the raw audio data, this is the set of numbers that defines the shape of the audio waveform, and use this information to set the height of the bottom of a spiral groove.

In this video you can hear a periodic frequency sweep on top of the steady sine wave best heard w headphones. This sweeping sound is caused by the needle moving over the thousands of tiny parallel bumps in the print caused by adjacent print-heads on the Objet machine.

This noise is unavoidable, but increasing the strength of the signal will help to make it less noticeable. Here is the video: RESULTS: At the end of all these tests I learned a few things about 3d printing records with the Objet: Groove Depth min of 48um below top of record - I found that grooves that kept the waveform at a minimum of 48um or 3 16 micron steps below the top of the record kept the needle in place while being played.

Attachments sine test 1. Processing has a library for dealing with audio called Minim , it is included with the more recent versions of Processing IDE. Unfortunately, this library is set up for real time audio applications and does not appear give you an easy way of extracting all the data from an audio file at once it makes you load it in small buffers piece by piece.

Since I could not find an easy way to load my wav files into Processing directly although I'm sure this must be possible , I've been importing stereo audio in the wav format into Python using the wav library, adding the left and right channels together, centering the data around zero, and exporting the resulting array of int's separated by commas to a txt file. Here is my wav to txt Python script I'm running this in Python 2.

Finally, it was time to start printing real audio! All my initial audio tests were done with the first 30 seconds from the opening track of one of the greatest albums ever written, The Pixies "Debaser.

The code is heavily commented, but here's the overall gist: An audio file is basically a list of numbers that plot a waveform over time.

The data that I pulled from Python in the last step is just that, the list of data points in the audio file. Essentially what I did in this Processing sketch was use this data to set the depth of a long, spiral groove on the record's surface.

Later when the needle passes over this groove, its tip will follow this path and actually trace out the original waveform stored in the audio data. Here's what that sounds like: Signal to noise is getting better, I added a little more audio to this file so that you can start to hear Frank Black's vocals coming in.

Here's the result of amplitude Signal to noise is better, but there is quite a bit of distortion. I decreased the amplitude to 24 next: This sounds a lot better. Good signal to noise without too much distortion.

Next I made a slight edit to my code to minimize the amount of data packed into the stl file. In the previous examples I created some space between grooves, basically a flat surface parallel to the top of the record.