Thousands of Rare Concert Recordings Are Landing On the Internet Archive (techcrunch.com) 29
A Chicago concert superfan Aadam Jacobs who has recorded more than 10,000 shows since the 1980s is working with Internet Archive volunteers to digitize the collection before the cassettes deteriorate. "So far, about 2,500 of these tapes have been posted on the Internet Archive, including some rare gems like a Nirvana performance from 1989," reports TechCrunch. From the report: For many of these recordings, Jacobs was using pretty mediocre equipment, but the volunteer audio engineers working with the Internet Archive have made these tapes sound great. One volunteer, Brian Emerick, drives to Jacobs' house once a month to pick up more boxes of tapes -- he has to use anachronistic cassette decks to play the tapes, which get converted into digital files. From there, other volunteers clean up, organize, and label the recordings, even tracking down song names from forgotten punk bands. The archive is available here.
Beware the Copyright Monster! (Score:1)
It's on the loose and mad as hell!
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More iconic when analog (Score:3, Interesting)
Somehow music was so much more iconic when it was still all analog, and recording it actually mattered, you had to commit.
kindof irresponsible (Score:3)
Re:kindof irresponsible (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the Archive can reasonably get away with this one. Unlike their "we can give away all the books because copyright is no longer a thing because covid" initiative, this effort is clearly and unambiguously archival in nature. Now, if they go and implement some kind of Pandora or Spotify type service for listening to these recordings, they're going to have trouble, but if the recordings are made available in some kind of academic setting they should be fine.
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"They should be fine" unfortunately doesn't pay the lawyers bills to get to a judge making that ruling.
Bankrupting your opponent legally is a well trodden path of big business, even when you don't have a legal leg on which to stand.
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They seem to have tens of thousands of live concerts up on their site that aren't even part of this collection.
So, it seems to be ok. Unless they are in a constant fight over all those live show recordings. i didn't even know they had them until just looking based on this article.
RIAA usually only owns the studio recordings, as well; the bands would own the performing rights.
Not that that would stop the crazy-litigious recording industry.
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You are correct in that figuring out the details of copyright law is like following Gandalf down with the Balrog.
The point I'm making is that being 'right' is very often utterly irrelevant to filing lawsuits.
Steamboat Willie is legally and entirely in the public domain. That doesn't stop Disney from suing anyone, bankrupting them, and then losing the suit. That's the entire strategy.
As something becomes popular, and widely known, lawyers come out of the woodwork.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-p... [arstechnica.com]
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RIAA usually only owns the studio recordings, as well; the bands would own the performing rights.
The music publishers own the mechanical and/or streaming rights. That's where it could be a problem. But given that this probably drives interest that makes them money rather than taking money away, there's a decent chance they won't care unless they think it will get them a big payday somehow.
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Is it, though? The recordings contain a lot of audience cheering, talking and laughter; miscellaneous background noise, and echos of the subject content -- the music. If the recording was made in a park, and a car randomly drove by with the radio turned up while a song was playing, would anyone argue the recording was copyrighted? Obviously, the intent of each of these recordings was to capture the music. But, the recordings were made by a private individual -- they're HIS re
Cassesstts sounded way better most think (Score:4, Informative)
By the mid 80s even a mid range deck could record 30-18k no issues and had SN 70db and dynamic ranges in the 30db with dolby C you lost a little high end and got compression. But a modern DSP and software could easily fix that.
I have a deck form the 90s now that can do 20-22k on metal tape and has 78db SN and over 50db of dynamic ranges. They easly sound better than 320br MP3.
by 2000 you get a teac that would do 15-25k metal tape and 80+ and 60db of dynamic range with almost zero noise.
If you wen hi fi VHS you get et 100db and 80db of range and almost 50db channel seperation with zero noise since the singles was FM encoded on the tape with a carrier wave around 10mhz
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by 2000 you get a teac that would do 15-25k metal tape and 80+ and 60db of dynamic range with almost zero noise. If you wen hi fi VHS you get et 100db and 80db of range and almost 50db channel seperation with zero noise since the singles was FM encoded on the tape with a carrier wave around 10mhz
By 2000, no one into live concert recording would touch analog cassettes tapes; everyone in the scene by 2000 all used DAT and some were moving to hard disk/solid state recording. The only folks using cassette by as last as the mid-90s didn't know what there were doing or were extremely poor (portable DATs could be had for $400).
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not completely true. DAT was big then but analog was very much alive in the professional and small band space. It was on it way out but stillt here.
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Re: Cassesstts sounded way better most think (Score:1)
This doesnt apply to bootleg recordings so much, but I am honestly wondering how much of what actually is proper mastering people attribute to the mystical qualities of the medium instead...
Case in point, you can squeeze every drop of life / dynamics out of a digital file by cranking the loudness, but if you pressed the same song onto vinyl or recorded onto tape, you would have to make some proper mastering decisions - and simply by NOT having the same insane amount of possibilities for loudness war, what y
copyright (Score:2)
A lot of bands back them allowed recording of concerts. Most had a rule you cant sell it.
Greatful dead actualy set aside space near the mixer booth and nade a feed for them to plug in.
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I wish all RIAA lawyers were more like the Grateful Dead. Grateful and, well....
in mono? (Score:1)
Lounge Ax! Empty Bottle! The Vic! Metro! That's crazy, this guy went to every friggin show. There are a lot of venues listed here that I've never even been to.
I don't see any mention of the recording equipment, but I'm guessing it's a mono tape recorder. I believe he had permission to record all of these shows for posterity, so sneaking in a mini-recorder wasn't necessary. Even in mono these would be super cool to work on mixing down. I imagine the tapes were digitized and normalized and not much else.
I wou
Re:in mono? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm listening to one of this "Low" show recordings now. and it says the source was a Master DAT on the recording's page -- probably meaning it came from the sound board.
i wonder if this guy was a sound tech.
The 'about' section about the collection says: "He started taping shows in the early 1980s, using cassette tapes and later transitioning to DATs and digital formats. "
There's a convenient search feature... no Kraftwerk; but I guess the original article says they are still archiving. so maybe they have it.
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I can't imagine he was a sound tech at all these shows, they're in a lot of different venues. I pulling the stereo feed from the board would be ideal, but most live recordings also have crowd noise which is something I could do without. Unless you want the crowd sing alongs...
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almost ever live show you have seen is mono, its just a physics thing. The difference between the stacks si so large it you sound awful..\
Great Project, Awful UI (Score:2)
This seems like a truly incredible project ... with a truly terrible UI.
1. DON'T USE IMAGES IN YOUR RESULTS IF EVERY IMAGE IS IDENTICAL! The fact that this makes things much harder to read should be obvious, even to someone with no UI expertise.
2. What do most users want to see? The name of the artist, right? But it's buried in tiny font, taking up maybe 10% of the total result, making it extremely hard to find/read. It should be clear and easy to read, taking up 25-50% of the result space (with a nice c
News at 11 (Score:2)
Even better than official (Score:2)
Some bootleg recordings of concerts are better than the official releases of the same concert series. Many artists elect to pick and choose songs from several different performances for the 'official' live release. A concert bootleg maintains continuity; crowd noise and banter are captured, and there are no cheesy fade-outs and fade-ins on what's billed as a "live" recording.
I have a bootleg of a complete Sarah McLachlan concert, recorded direct from a soundboard feed. It's SO much better than the official