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 to maintain audiovisual material from 1985, and a little over a year ago, he worked with the Internet Archive to complete the Great 78 project 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 donated to it, most of which date from the 1950s and earlier. These early recordings were made of shellac, and is not the resin they are made of discs today. Shellac is a brittle material that was outgrown around 1960, as it often creates unusual levels of noise and can literally break in your hands if not handled properly. Without digitization, it is likely that some of these recordings will eventually be destroyed and lost to history forever.
The Internet Archive's focus is on digitizing records that are less widely available and overlooked. 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 "record artifact".
In the Internet Archive's Great 78 database, you can search by the author, who has digitized the disc, the year of the original recording, and more. When you listen to a recording, there are often alternatives or multiple versions of the same song that have been recorded with different styles. They are all available to leave comments and download them.
You can help and contribute to the Great 78 project, as you are always looking for volunteers to help improve metadata, collector contacts, 78s donations, and more. Or you can just see one of their collections and enjoy a piece of musical history.
