Shai Fishman is a composer, performer, multi-instrumentalist and sound engineer. He has composed music for museums, feature films and is one of the creators of The Voca People, an international a capella group that has appeared on the Italian X-Factor and has had millions of YouTube views for clips of its performances.

At Amoeba, he’s helped to digitize Amoeba’s collection of vintage vinyl and 78s for exclusive download at Amoeba.com’s Vinyl Vaults. Right now Amoeba is featuring more than 100 remastered songs by jazz pioneer Louis Armstrong, first released from 1923-1926. I spoke with Fishman about the digitizing and remastering process.

Amoeba: Can you take me through some of the basics of converting vinyl to digital? What are some of the concerns when dealing with older vinyl?

Fishman: As far is converting vinyl to digital media, the main concern is high-fidelity digitizing. We need to make sure that the analog recording process is done in such quality that it reproduces the signature vinyl sound we all love so much, in an authentic way, while still enjoying all the benefits of digital media.

Our digitizing allows for 96 KHz and 24 bit audio sampling resolution, which is more than enough to reproduce vinyl and at the same time allows us to have some room to manipulate the wave file, if need be.

When dealing with old vinyl the main concern is eliminating the noise that exists on copies that are older than 30 or 40 (roughly) years. That noise profile may be a simple surface noise, clicks, pops, crackle or any other intricate profile that we have to deal with in order to produce a digital copy that is in keeping with today’s sound standard.

Here is a first glimpse of Amoeba’s Icon Series, artists we consider to be the greatest and most important musicians of all time.

We’re starting with Louis Armstrong, indisputably one of the finest and most influential musicians ever. We’ve put together and remastered his lifework from thousands of difficult to find sources and we’ll be making his entire catalog of over 4,000 unique performances available on Amoeba.com soon. Amongst these are many performances that most people have never heard or had access to, particularly in beautifully remastered form.

For now, here is a sampling of Louis’ material from the '20s. We have remastered all these songs from pristine original 78s generously made available from the collections of some good friends of Amoeba including Terry Zwigoff, Sherwin Dunner, and Robert Crumb.

The remastering was done by our sound team headed by the renowned Shai Fishman. The team has spent countless hours doing a truly masterful job of bringing forward the warmth, clarity, and resolution of these sides.

Here is Louis as you’ve never heard him before. All songs are available in MP3, M4A (ALAC), and WAV. We hope you enjoy these! There are many more to come.