The final video was rendered with ffmpeg and took about 20 minutes to complete: ffmpeg -v info -y -f image2 -thread_queue_size 32 -r 30 \ Hey - Great writeup! While mapping the fast and slow spots on the record took very little time, it felt a bit sloppy. The only reason the jpegs exist is for distribution. The hydrogen/electron/transition thing was a spoiler, I have to admit. As this wasn't a very Kerbish part of the project, I'm going to skip any further discussion on the topic. This effect could possibly be a result of RIAA filtering. David not only had gotten access to the master tapes for his anniversary vinyl edition, but happily provided me with a copy of the image data audio!!! The circles above the waveform show where the strong peaks were detected, the rectangle is the old peak detection algorithm. The waveform at the top suggests that the audio would somehow be broken down into pixel values, though I had no guess as to how this would work until I started poking at the data. However, since the record was developed in the 70s, where analog was king, I assume that it's. The challenge was finding technology capable of the task. (Please ensure that your audio output device is at 44.1 kHz. And sudden changes "pull" the DC level with them. If nothing happens, download Xcode and try again. I would expect this image to be white-on-black or black-on-white, not gradient-on-gradient. Launched in 1977, both Voyager spacecraft began a historic journey and each carried a unique 'time capsule' along with them. However it cannot detect position in time, Autocorrelation - can be used to detect scanline duration, but not position. It's probably better if you code your own approach. It's navigational information – distances and directions to local pulsars. It seemed sensible that the key to the timing was on the record cover, but I was having a hard time working it out. Note that when there is a DC section with little change the signal tends towards zero. There must be something my heuristic missed, since I still have a couple images with major problems. If you look again at Figure 2, you can see that the trace trends upward over time. • Spend more time looking at how the traces are bounded. How I decoded the images on the Voyager Golden Record. I brought up the data in Audacity, a free audio editing package, and worried that I'd made a mistake. The surface of the record case is engraved with pictograms that describe how to decode these images from the record. My inspiration started when I first saw the associated video for this article: In the end I've settled on a custom implementation that's pretty simple to code: In the image above you can see a difficult scenario for the algorithm. Yeah. Voyager Golden Record Decoder About. Some of the images are strictly practical, showing the records' finders how to decode things like human numbers and measurements of …