Internet Archive has 1,3 Terabytes of lost music on MySpace

The lost music that once existed on MySpace, is now available from the Internet Archive which hopefully reaches a size of 1,3 Terabytes.

MySpace, once the largest and most popular social networking site on the Internet, was used by many users in the early days of the Internet to host music.

MySpace users could upload music to the service. Things on the internet have changed and MySpace has been replaced by Facebook and other social networking services.

The music that users uploaded to MySpace was still available on the site until recently, but as the company recently changed servers, lost access to all songs, photos and videos that had been uploaded to the site before 2015.

MySpace obviously had no backups, so the Internet Archive came into play. The Internet Archive took a portion of the MySpace music file and uploaded it to its servers. The file is about 1,3 Terabytes in size and is a huge collection of 490.000 mp3 songs, which MySpace users uploaded to the networking service between 2008 and 2010.

Interested users can browse the entire archive through Archive.org. MySpace Dragon Hoard can also be downloaded either directly or as a torrent file.

However, browsing the 144 zip files does not display information about the artist or the name of the song. When browsing, you only see long lists of filenames. There is a metadata file that provides information, but its connection to the actual files is quite inaccessible.

A tool called Hobbit has been created and works as a music player and as a search tool to find songs that interest you. You can use it to search for a file or to find out if certain files are in the Archive.

Simply upload the Hobbit to a browser and enter a song name or artist name to get all the songs that match your search. The first search will take a long time, but subsequent searches are quick and painless.

You can play any song. Some of the songs, especially those of commercial bands and artists, are just clips and not the whole song.

The file is useful for MySpace users who missed songs they uploaded between 2008 and 2010, provided they can remember the title or artist. Everyone else can just play songs using the electronic music player or download the file.

The Internet Archive hosts a treasure that is no longer available on the Internet or elsewhere. Not only MySpace hardware, but if you look around the web, you'll find old Winamp Skins, arcade games, old computer and game magazines, as well as classic DOS and C-64 games.