The New York Archive of Contemporary Music (ARC) has reached digitalization of 50.000 78-speed discs, which you can listen to and download for free.
The Archive of Contemporary Music started audiovisual preservation since 1985, and a little over a year ago, he partnered with Internet Archive για να φέρει σε πέρας το project Great 78 and distribute it to the public.
Together with the George Blood LP and various volunteers, Great 78 has so far gone online 50.000 digitized 78 RPM trays and recordings of rolls, which you can listen to in the Internet Archive with all their parasites, as if you had a 78 turntable.
In ongoing projects, the Internet Archive actually has over 200.000 physical recordings that have been donated to it, most of them from the 1950 and earlier. These first recordings were made by shellac, and it's not the resin that made the discs today. Shellac is a fragile material that has been overcome around 1960 as it often creates unusual levels of noise and can literally break into your hands if it does not handle it properly. Without digitization, it is likely that some of these recordings will eventually be destroyed and lost in history forever.
The focus of Internet Archive is to digitize files that are less widely available and ignored. The collection offers a wide range of early blues, bluegrass, yodeling, and several Novachord synthesizer recordings from 1941.
Digitizing these old pieces of music is a complex process. Different types of stylus can affect how a track sounds when played, and playback speeds were not standardized until around the late 20s, meaning there is debate about the "correct speed" at which a record should be played. . Those working on this project also have to make aesthetic decisions, such as microphone placement and what frequencies the disc material is capable of reproducing (which is lame compared to modern audio reproductions). The goal is not to remaster a file or remove all existing playback artifacts from variables such as how many times it was played or how it was originally recorded, but to preserve the disc as a "historical artifact."
In the Internet Archive's Great 78 database, you can search by creator, who digitized the record, year of original recording, and more. When you hear a enrollment, there are often alternate or multiple versions of the same song recorded with different styluses. They are all available to leave comments and download.
You can help and contribute to the Great 78 project if you want, since the team always looking for volunteers to help improve metadata, contact collectors, donate 78s, and more. Or you can just check out one of their collections and enjoy a piece of music history.
