None.

If an old photo is what you've got, make the best at extracting from it.

The OP makes clear that this was the only viable way of extracting information. 1 >>> 0.

Also, as a sufficiently early recording (anything before the mid-1940s), the medium would have been shellac or wax rather than vinyl. Shellac especially is immensely fragile and prone to shatter when handling.

I'm not telling you what you meant.

I'm telling you what I heard, and, in reponse to your implied question, why I'd responded as I had.

I worked on an earlier version of this project where we actually had to play the albums but we also took high res (300 dpi tifs) of the individual records with the hope that we'd never have to physically touch them again. So I'll claim contributing to this effort. ;)

Paragraph 2 of the link.

Every time an archivist touches the media - no matter gloves, a clean environment, the care applied, etc - there's a risk of altering or even damaging it. In our case, the eventual goal was to keep the ever-deteriorating originals in nitrogen-filled vaults.

Therefore, if you can avoid having to touch it often (or ever), then you've managed to protect it better, probably longer, and more cheaply.

Static, high-resolution photography (or other imaging) is about the least-invasive, lowest-risk options available.

Glad to see this phrase from The Things They Carried outlive the book.

ffmpeg is doing all the heavy lifting there. VLC mostly uses libraries from ffmpeg.

I have no idea why people are so impressed by VLC. Anything built on libavcodec can play all the same files, but they won't have VLC's deficiencies in performance, quality, reliability, or usability. ffmpeg is a great project and VLC an incompetent one riding its coattails.

“The paraphrase of Gödel's Theorem says that for any record player, there are records which it cannot play because they will cause its indirect self-destruction.”

―Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach