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Preserving the Sound of America
jonerik writes "The Associated Press (by way of MSNBC) has this article on the Library of Congress' National Recording Registry, which 'seeks to ensure even greater protection for some of the most notable songs, speeches and other utterances.' To that end, the library's extensive collection of recordings and photos will soon be moved to a massive 41-acre complex built into the side of a mountain in Culpeper, Virginia. When construction on the site is completed - in about three years - anything stored in Culpeper should be available via computer at the library's Madison Building on Capitol Hill. The Library of Congress has been collecting recordings for almost 100 years, the first being a recording of a speech by German Emperor Wilhelm II. Since then the library has collected recorded speeches by every American President since Theodore Roosevelt, oral histories, music, radio broadcasts, and other examples of recorded sound." This sounds like a collection which will become more valuable as more people have access to the actual content of the collections.
"This sounds like a collection which will become more valuable as more people have access to the actual content of the collections. "
Unfortunately, thanks to the recent copyright rulings, nobody will be able to hear or see this content until Fry comes out of cyrogenic sleep.
What format would they deliver it in? MP3? Would they use their own government MP3 encoder and pay license fees? Ogg? Wav? Real? Audio out to a big loud speaker that gets pointed to your house? What?
The RIAA is going to have a field day with this one...
Hate me!
...someone 'samples' this public-domain sound archive to make their own shitty techno music?
hitler_vs_truman---battlerap.mp3
~D:
"This sounds like a collection which will become more valuable as more people have access to the actual content of the collections."
+1, Insightful, anyone?
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Or they could just put it on Kazaa. Less chance of records being lost if its on a lot of computers.
Massive networking attempt for friends
Mickey Hart of Grateful Dead fame has had a big part in this effort. It's a real noble movement they're participating in. Everyone thinks history is always written and suddenly people realized that we have the technology to make it more. Read more about his involvement and Save our Sounds here.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
It's obviously a good idea to fortify the storage site, but what kind of arrangements will they have for off-site backup?
If these are the most important recordings, it would be a tragic loss to have a natural disaster or similar event destroy what may be the only complete recordings.
unixkb.com -- articles on practical Unix issues.
'The Library of Congress has been collecting recordings for almost 100 years, the first being a recording of a speech by German Emperor Wilhelm II.'
The speech apparently went as follows:
Emperor: My dog has no nose.
Crowd: 'How does it smell'?
Emperor: Awful.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
Ahh, no. Like any other library, they can buy their own copy of anything they want.
Vote for Pedro
Not much use to having this stuff in archive, if it's all going to be copyright in the next 10 years...
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
The REAL french national anthem?
Caution: MP3
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
I heard a piece, including some sound clips, this afternoon on ATC. The story and a few selections are here. It is an excellent project. The copyright limitations are disappointing, however.
This site is a former bunker for the Federal Reserve Board and once held $1 billion in cash in case of a nuclear attack. It was transferred to the LoC in 1997. (Presumably this cash is now held elsewhere.)
sulli
RTFJ.
Like they say, 90% of everything is crap. However, the 10% of good stuff differs from person to person :-)
Link1
Link2
Link3
Store recordings in a fortress, and you'll preserve them for 100 years.
Digitalize and upload them, and they'll live as long as you have a running server.
Besides, a recording is more useful on the net than in a mountain.
War doesn't prove who's right, just who's left.
January 27, 2006 - President Stallman and Gnu/FBI announce arrest and detention of terrorist group believed affiliated with Hilary Rosen
Giving public thanks to the constant vigilance on the part of tens of thousands of GNUTIA (Gnu's Not Total Information Awareness) server operators, President Stallman announced the disruption of a terrorist plot, allegedly involving weapons of mass destruction and notorious fugitive from justice, Hilary Rosen.
In his 2006 State of the Onion Speech, President Stallman announced:
Responding after the President's remarks, Mr. Fritz Hollings, (appointed RIAA head after losing his seat in the GNU/Linux electoral victory of 2004), had this to say:
It is interesting that when the Library of Congress uses the word 'protected' in regards to a sound recording they mean exactly the opposite of what the RIAA means when they use the same word.
I like the LOC's meaning better.
tato (and tato only)
This post is strictly opinion, including the spelling.
I'd like to see a volunteer group turn this historical treasure trove into digital sound files and put them on DVD or optical media for safekeeping. Many of the recordings are on magnetic tape or other media that deteriorate over time, sometimes quickly.
The expensive part would be getting access to the necessary equipment to play the original recordings. Lots of geeks have DVD burners.
Catherine
Too bad 15 acres of that is going to be taken up with Coke jingles.
I'm much funnier now that I'm a subscriber.
I apologise for not providing a link as I'm at work right now and can't post long. Maybe some other kind reader will?
Wah!
Sounds like the federal government is taking lessons from the mormon church in Salt Lake City. (All of the Mormon Church Geneology records are entoumbed in a Mountain in Big Cotton Wood Canyon in Salt Lake City, and up by McCall Idaho. They do it because of the fact that if the Apocolypse ever happens there are records.
The government must know somthing we dont...
---
Re: me making fun of people with speech impediments (or people who aren't cunning linguists, as you say), the man is the President of the United States of America. Since his job is basically to look good on camera and read speeches, it would be less embarassing if he could do it properly. Heh.
Wah!
And it doesn't end there. A modern violin does not sound like a violin that Mozart composed for. Why? Difference in materials in making one, and more importantly (even when you're dealing with Mozart-old violins) modern synthetics used in string making.
This is a bit of a hellaciously huge argument in the opera community, who strive to get recordings of pieces the way a composer intended. There's also a lot of little changes; The meaning of 'allegro' has changed over the years, as well as the 'note to tune by,' currently A 440.
Emmett Plant
CEO, Xiph.org Foundation
British Pathe has digitized and made public a huge quantity of their newsreels online, starting with the 1890s and going to 1970. Watch nearly a century of riots, wars and cheezy human interest stories on pretty much every topic. Type in "computer" and see the history of computers, as told in short chunks with dramatic voiceover.
Federal law requires that any copyrighted sound must be stored at the library.
Is this the same government who has been busy giving god-like status to content creators? I can just see somebody suing the LoC to keep their content away from eyes/ears who aren't paying for it. But of course, they may let it slide if they put DRM on the content. Maybe. If they're in a good mood. Oh, but wait....
"We have every format you can imagine and every problem with every format," said Michael Taft, who helps run the program. "What we have to do is find a way of taking sound off of all of these different media and storing them as computer files in such a way that they will be readable and accessible not just today, but 100, 200 years from now."
"I'm sorry sir, but that part of history has been lost due to money grubbing companies who revoked our playback key (or they went out of business, the timed key is lost because it can no longer be renewed, and nobody knows what format the file is stored in), and the guy who tried to crack the file is currently serving a 500 year prison term for attempted circumvention. Have a nice day!"
-R
About a week or two ago, I saw a documentary on The History Channel about this exact project. I was rather surprised to see them digitizing audio on Win95 workstations with a few primitive apps. These guys seriously need technological help. But the real focus here is on analog. I cringed as I saw historic reel-to-reel tapes shred when played, I was even more appalled when I saw vinyl-on-aluminum records that the vinyl popped off when he took it out of the sleeve. He said "oops, this album is ruined." They discard damaged vinyl like that, but I think they're screwing up. There are already laser scanners that can read the grooves optically, all you have to do is keep ALL the pieces and put them on a backing in the correct position, the laser will scan off the grooves and you can edit out the pops in postproduction.
But ultimately this is the same old conservation issue. Do you try to capture the deteriorating tapes and records NOW, or do you let them deteriorate further in hopes that a miracle solution will appear before they are completely destroyed? There is no good answer.
Bzzzt. As the guy one thread above pointed out, copyright law chapter 7 section 704 says:
If you were congress and invented IP, you'd be a fool to saddle yourself with the restricions you're imposing on everyone else.
Sung to the tune of "If You're Happy And You Know It, Clap Your Hands" If you cannot find Osama, bomb Iraq. If the markets are a drama, bomb Iraq. If the terrorists are frisky, Pakistan is looking shifty, North Korea is too risky, Bomb Iraq. If we have no allies with us, bomb Iraq. If we think someone has dissed us, bomb Iraq. So to hell with the inspections, Let's look tough for the elections, Close your mind and take directions, Bomb Iraq. It's "pre-emptive non-aggression", bomb Iraq. Let's prevent this mass destruction, bomb Iraq. They've got weapons we can't see, And that's good enough for me 'Cos it's all the proof I need Bomb Iraq. If you never were elected, bomb Iraq. If your mood is quite dejected, bomb Iraq. If you think Saddam's gone mad, With the weapons that he had, (And he tried to kill your dad), Bomb Iraq. If your corporate fraud is growin', bomb Iraq. If your ties to it are showin', bomb Iraq. If your politics are sleazy, And hiding that ain't easy, And your manhood's getting queasy, Bomb Iraq. Fall in line and follow orders, bomb Iraq. For our might knows not our borders, bomb Iraq. Disagree? We'll call it treason, Let's make war not love this season, Even if we have no reason, Bomb Iraq.
Our Boston Public Library, the so called Massachusetts Library
/ stories
of Last Recourse, deflects people interested in our Sound Archives collections.
Of interest are the recordings of now defunct local broadcasters.
Shelf lists are public record, but BPL has
violated state freedom of information principles!
See also
Weblog. Guide to Problematical Library Use. Boston Public Library.
Stories
http://GuideToProblematicalLibraryUse.WebLogs.com
Updates
http://GuideToProblematicalLibraryUse.WebLogs.com
http://zork.net/~dsaklad
"My name is Linus Torvalds and I pronounce Linux, Linux."
What licence is that under?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Not sure why that was modded funny, though I suppose there is some sweet irony there. But rarely does anyone talk about the value of p2p as an archive. In the heyday of napster I downloaded a bunch of speeches, stuff that wasn't easy to find, black nationalist stuff from the 60s, moon landing recordings, lectures, and so forth. But I rarely see that kind of stuff on gnutella when I look for it, and I wish it was still there. When I look for music, it's always easy to find the popular stuff, but I rarely find much of the more obscure stuff I want to find. It's ironic that the death of napster didn't stop what the RIAA wanted stopped - the large-scale trading of their big selling hits - but it did stop the more legitimate use of p2p to give people access to a relatively comprehensive archive of information. It's disgraceful that the RIAA's greed and inflated sense of self-importance would stand in the way of such a significant advancement in the human sciences. And it's pathetic that the rest of the human species is enabling what amounts to the wholesale theft of human history and culture! In ancient times, great advances in knowledge were stopped by the forces of irrationality and superstition. Today we look back and chuckle about how primitive we were then. But today we do the same thing, vilifying our visionaries as thieves instead of heretics. And we do it to mollify greed and ego rather than superstition.
On a side note, I think the ego thing is huge for the RIAA and their cohorts. Their arrogance is megalomaniacal! I mean come on, RIAA, I don't want to download your precious britney spears crap that you spend the rest of your time shoving down my throat anyway. If I wanted that shit I could go to a freakin record store. And it's not like I can't hear it for free on the radio!
No, the beauty and significance of Napster in its prime -- a truly unfettered p2p network -- was not that kids could get for free the stuff that they continued to spend millions on through t-shirts, concerts, etc. It was the fact that at any time, you could be in a conversation about the blues and mention Ethyl Waters or Ida Fox, and you were just a few clicks away from being able to actually listen to the songs you probably wouldn't even be able to find at a record store if you tried. Imagine being able to do that with the library of congress! Or all of film history! Yes, it's true, the entertainment companies will no longer be able to rely on big multimillion dollar stars in order to retain their domination of public consciousness, but is that a bad thing? Think about it.