5000 Cylinder Recordings Placed Online

Jon Noring writes "The Department of Special Collections at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) Davidson Library recently placed online, with free access, over 5000 sound recordings as part of its Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project. These recordings date from the 1890's to the 1920's, all transfered from Edison cylinders using state-of-the-art equipment. The restorations are first-class, using CEDAR tools. Besides MP3 and streaming audio, the raw transfers are also available for diy'ers to try their own hand at audio restoration. For those who like their music 'hot', there's not much there since most of the cylinders predate the start of the Jazz Era (ca. 1917), but there is some early 'mouldy fygge' dance-type jazz, like 1920's 'Peggy' by Lopez and Hamilton's Kings of Harmony Orchestra."

Comments

Re:Just don't put this guy in charge...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ebaumsworld is worse than Roland Piquepaille by a factor of at least 100. Please stay away. Thank you.

A good example of why we need to limit copyright

[Gonarat]

This is a good example why we need to roll back copyright to a reasonable period of time, or at least require periodic registration and renewal for copyright protection to continue. If they had the copyright laws back then that we have now, these recordings would never see the light of day. There is little or no commercial value to these recordings, but they are a valuable part of our history. It would be a shame to lose them to the ravages of time because of insane copyright laws, like what can (and is happening) to film from 1923 on.

Public Domain

[Phroggy]

Here's a good example of content that should be in the public domain. It's really too bad that just about anything newer than the 1920s is still under copyright - Happy Birthday is owned by a division of AOL Time Warner and won't fall into the public domain for another 25 years (unless Congress extends it again).

Re:The Edison recordings are not encumbered

[mrchaotica]

Heh, you think that'll stop Edison?! He will come back from the grave with a can of whoop-ass, beause that's how much of an bastard he was. He singlehandedly created the Hollywood movie industry, because they all fled the east coast so that they could disregard his patents (with their accompanying huge royalty costs).

Re:Lossless compression?

[ksheff]

But it is good for archiving. They would have saved them a bunch of disk space and bandwidth if they would have saved the raw audio as FLAC. Not to mention that you can put some of the song information in the file as tags.