'No one else is saving it': the fight to protect a historic music collection | Hacker News Reader

'No one else is saving it': the fight to protect a historic music collection

theguardian.com

71 pointsKaibeezy27 comments

I know of an online music collection that would need to be archived. Maybe by these people?

There is an amateur enthusiast named Steven Kozobarich who restored some very early recordings of traditional Balkan music. His Youtube channel is the only remaining place where copies of the songs are still reachable.

He used to maintain a blog-like website the previous decade, and it still remains, but the links to the external hosting service (with the tracks) don't work anymore.

Link to his channel:

https://www.youtube.com/c/StevenKozobarich/

Contact archive.org and https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Main_Page

Or just youtube-dl them and upload them to archive.org yourself

i used to build a collection of (.bg) recordings of theatralized fairytales and kid's songs initialy but then also of recited poetry and serious-theater-plays and radio-theaters and such artistical-speech recordings.. from LPs, tapes, cds, radio.. For free for everyone bothered to search and download and enjoy, no ads or crap, before we all drown into some kind of shallow b'english.. After 10 years and 3000 pieces, spanning ~60 years, half from radio, and some popularity, it was taken down (and sued) by national Radio because of some "rights". Around the case-going, i learned there are about 10000+ pieces of the kind alone that they have there. Rusting on tapes. copied on cracking CDs. Aired few times (in 60 years). Never published.

That was 12y ago. They still do broadcast about (on average) 0.5-1 really different piece a month (when not repeating others). No such thing as podcast, download, search, whatever. Do the math.

Culture preserving.. is not what a state machinery is for.

Here a frozen copy from 2012:

https://gramofonche.chitanka.info/

p.s. it was a funny / sad finding some years go, that the biggest collection of bulgarian music and speech and such is at.. Library of Congress of USA. While the best searchable metadata on bulgarian LPs is kept by some russian. But you know, the state .bg does have a thing called "National Library"..

cheers

There was a dude named Milman Parry[0] who went to Yugoslavia in the 20th century and recorded something like 3500 aluminum records of traditional cultural music, which were later transcribed into like 100 notebooks.

If nothing else, I wish it was all digitized.

But nobody else is gonna do it!

Oh to have the time and place to do it myself...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milman_Parry

Actually, a collection of records is in a rather enviable position - at least records don't degrade over time the way other media (magnetic tape, floppies, not to mention film rolls - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_preservation) do...

You’re right, but they degrade in a different way. Presuming you don’t abnormally damage it in some way, you’d only expect to get a few hundred plays out of a record before it starts to noticeably degrade. By 1000 plays you’d expect it to be very noticeably degraded.

I have LPs that have locked grooves at the end of the songs where they keep playing the same loop until you manually stop them. At 33 1/3 RPM, they would hit 1000 plays after 30 minutes, they don't noticeably degrade in that period of time.

A friend said he would leave records like that playing for weeks on the same locked groove and that they did eventually wear out. A week would be 7 * 24 * 60 * 33.33 so 336,000 plays.

It also has the advantage that records have a substantial niche amongst music aficionados and collectors as a desirable music and cover art format. Even obscure records in genres few people care about have some chance of surviving outside archives. (Someone posted about the last DVD rental place in London recently, and my first thought was of all the stores selling vinyl that outlasted it)

In this case it's clear the records are no longer in any danger of being thrown away (and were never in danger of being wiped and recorded over like other storage media), and what the collector and his celebrity backers are really looking for is a suitably "special" venue to showcase them

Similarly: Felix Grant did a jazz show in Washington DC for decades. He amassed a massive collection of jazz albums that eventually became the Felix Grant Jazz Archive at AMU.

ref: https://udc.libguides.com/FGJA

He's also a figure in the largest jazz festival that no one ever heard of. The Lorton Jazz Festival played exclusively inside a Virginia prison from 1958 to 1968.

ref: https://duckduckgo.com/?hps=1&q="Lorton+Jazz+Festival"

Large collections require large buyers. Seattle's Bop Street Records closed a few years ago, with 500,000 records in stock. According to BSR's one-time website, the WSJ had rated it one of the top-5 in the US. It got calls from around the world.

In May 2020 the Times reported the sale of all the records - sight unseen - to Internet Archive.

https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/music/a-happy-end...

That would be a great source for training AI.

Why aren't we saving this stuff? We have a way to turn dumps of raw human creation into very useful models. Why isn't there a scramble to preserve things like this in the very least so that it can be used as training data?

Publicity like this should really help. How many people would even be aware of it? Well, clearly a number of people in the music world, but not many outside it. Now a few more.

The article mentions that they convert to digital from the massive physical archive they have. I think it's a matter of turning those hundreds of thousands for records that they have into digital is a massive effort.

I can see why they dont save the physical copies, but I think the problem is physical record input rate > digitize rate leading to tons of inventory space.

What a sad, sad rationale for preserving the fruits of human creativity.

The enemy of my enemy...

... is my enemy's enemy, no more, no less. Maxim 29

https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2004-12-31

https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2003-03-08

https://schlockmercenary.fandom.com/wiki/The_Seventy_Maxims_...

> is my enemy's enemy, no more, no less.

The enema of my enemy: Simultaneously more and less.

Fruits are made to be eaten.

I agree! But I also understand that there is an awful lot to preserve that possibly would never be experienced again. Sure, they're preserved but if nobody ever sits down and listens to the record, does it exist? Is it worth preserving?

I believe in preservation but I also have a hard time justifying the rationale. To what end?

If things keep going as they have been, there will be more people in the future available to stuff from the past than there currently are.

This is true even if the population flattens out.

People save music by pirating, but copyright law and its enforcement sabotage the effort. The current copyright system leads to a loss of cultural heritage.

For a narrow definition of music yes. Music is more than the audio. It's the packaging, the media, the artwork, the liner notes etc. The changes to these over time are as important as the changes to the music IMHO. They speak to our culture as much as the music does.

There's plenty of pirates who care about preserving artwork and liner notes! It's not everything, sure, but it's a lot.

And arguably they do a better job than the big (and small) labels which just throw a bunch of MP3s at you, maybe with a cover.jpg if you are lucky.

This is primarily an archive of physical media (less than 10% have been digitized, and the goal isn’t to replace it with a digital archive), not very amenable to be used as training data in that form. The focus being on physical archival and cataloguing the physical artifacts is probably also why it has trouble getting funds.

Funding. The National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities struggle to get funded, especially with disciplines like history being in the crosshairs of conservatives. Archives barely get by and often have to make hard decisions about what the preserve based on their budgets. And then going from physical media to digitization is a nontrivial expense.

I think that preservation of art and history is amazingly valuable and I think that efforts to make this stuff available digitally is amazingly valuable, but these aren't profitable enterprises so they depend on a trickle of grant funding.

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