Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project
This was posted on
slashdot.org the other day so some of you may have seen this already. If not, it's well worth checking out. I'll just give you the text from the main page for a description:
Quote:
Cylinder recordings, the first commercially produced sound recordings, are a snapshot of musical and popular culture in the decades around the turn of the 20th century. They have long held the fascination of collectors and have presented challenges for playback and preservation by archives and collectors alike.
With funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the UCSB Libraries have created a digital collection of over 5,000 cylinder recordings held by the Department of Special Collections. In an effort to bring these recordings to a wider audience, they can be freely downloaded or streamed online.
On this site you will have the opportunity to find out more about the cylinder format, listen to thousands of musical and spoken selections from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and discover a little-known era of recorded sound. Click the search button to begin, or sample some of our favorite selections in the Featured Cylinder section.
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It's been a bit slow because of the traffic that's flowing in from slashdot but it's well worth digging through if you've got the patience right now. If you're into music that hisses, snaps, and crackles, you'll enjoy this.