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March 11, 2016 10:42 AM   Subscribe

The David W. Niven Collection of Early Jazz Legends, 1921-1991 650 tapes · 1,000 hours · 1,378 WAV files · 637 GB · 691 JPEG scans of cassette liner cards & literature. Meticulously Collected, Compiled, and Narrated by David W. Niven, 1930-1993.
posted by steinwald (34 comments total) 96 users marked this as a favorite
 
Incredible! Thanks for this.
posted by sutt at 10:50 AM on March 11, 2016


Oh, thank goodness it isn't all one giant .zip file.

This looks pretty amazing, and is something I will be digging around in. Thanks for posting this!
posted by hippybear at 10:50 AM on March 11, 2016


A music producer who I showed this to last week boggled, and immediately asked, "Can this be legal?"

I told him that I trust in the Internet Archive knowing what they're doing, but.... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Hoping for the best!
posted by wenestvedt at 10:50 AM on March 11, 2016


Generously Donated by David W. Niven to the Foxborough High School Jazz Program, Stephen C. Massey, Director, 2010. Archived to CD-Quality Digital Audio by Kevin J. Powers, 2010-2011. Now available in multiple formats on Archive.org.

I went to the Internet Archive blog in hopes of reading more about the how and why of this collection (how did they find it, why did they decide to add it to their ever-growing public treasure trove), but I'll hope that jscott turns (back) up to fill in the gaps.
posted by filthy light thief at 10:57 AM on March 11, 2016 [2 favorites]


Of course it's not legal.
It's been digitized from cassettes that were made from 33's and 78's:

posted by the Real Dan at 11:00 AM on March 11, 2016


Is it "David W. Niven" so that visitors don't think it's David-Niven-the-actor's mixtape collection?

Because I would also be interested in hearing that, if it exists.
posted by the sobsister at 11:02 AM on March 11, 2016 [3 favorites]


This is fantastic, but as others have said - how long until DMCA kicks in? Better get to listening while we can, I brought the good scotch, let's get comfortable!
posted by NordyneDefenceDynamics at 11:12 AM on March 11, 2016


Amazing. Thanks for the link.
posted by Mr.Me at 11:13 AM on March 11, 2016


Of course it's not legal.
It's been digitized from cassettes that were made from 33's and 78's:


I don't think the lineage alone makes it illegal. I think the commentary is what makes this more than just home-made mix-tapes, which would be (mostly) illegal (some music is clearly outside of copyright, being made pre-1923).
posted by filthy light thief at 11:14 AM on March 11, 2016 [2 favorites]


This is amazing, amazing stuff! (Streaming some early Frank Sinatra right now.)

But isn't it sad that on seeing a treasure like this offered up to the world, the first thought of nerds like us is that it couldn't possibly be legal? (Of course I had the same first thought - how long till some random company issues a DMCA takedown notice?)
posted by RedOrGreen at 12:03 PM on March 11, 2016 [2 favorites]


Of course it's not legal.

Culture is not property, no matter what the lawyers have told you.
posted by mhoye at 12:10 PM on March 11, 2016 [6 favorites]


This is an awesome cultural treasure that should probably be free for anyone to enjoy, but of course the rights to many of these songs are held by companies that may have very little to do with the artists involved in their creation or the groups involved in their production and distribution. These companies have the right to sell or not sell these songs as they see fit, so the question again is, "Does copyright as it exists now serve the public good by promoting the production of art?"
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 12:11 PM on March 11, 2016 [4 favorites]


The only reason for any takedown request for these recordings would be spite. These are not things that are selling in anyone's long-tail catalog. They probably aren't even available for purchase from the label at this point. I think it's a pretty safe collection of stuff. Wonderful stuff.
posted by hippybear at 12:14 PM on March 11, 2016


I actually don't mind if takedown notices get issued – as long as it means that all of these things become available in electronic form in some way or another. As far as I can tell, there are at least a handful of things in this collection that have never been digitized before (particularly among the Bix Beiderbecke and Art Tatum collections).

It's a bit shocking how many digitization oversights there are in music before 1940. There's no really big market for it, so some stuff has just never been ripped to electronic form from the records. Sidney Bechet, for example, made literally hundreds of recordings in his lifetime; of those, only about 40 are available on Spotify (repeated over and over again, of course, on several dozen "greatest hits" packages that happen to have been digitized). Same for Art Tatum and Fats Waller. When my dinky little record collection of 300 records has dozens of things in it that you can't find anywhere online, that's a problem. And honestly I've often been tempted to start ripping things, put them online, and see what happens.

Having someone issue a DMCA so they can turn around and distribute these things themselves, and make the two dollars per year or whatever they'd make throwing these things on iTunes and Spotify, might actually be a fine outcome. At least the stuff would be preserved.

Eventually, in my ideal world, somebody would go through and actually carefully catalog the records of old pre-1940 greats, and release full discography collections to electronic streaming agencies. These people didn't make "LPs," of course – they cut singles, although sometimes one was recorded on a date and sometimes thirty. It would be much preferable to me if I could pull up Sidney Bechet and find a simple full discography of his music, organized by recording date or by song title or whatever other variable I'd wish, grouped not as a collection of stupid repetitive best-of sets of 12 but as a coherent single stream of songs.

But then – nobody asked me, and nobody's likely to any time soon.
posted by koeselitz at 12:25 PM on March 11, 2016 [9 favorites]


As much as I love the Internet Archive, trying to grab the individual torrent files by choosing among the 650 (or some fraction thereof) different thumbnails to load up 650 image-laden web pages to then grab one file...well, that just isn't going to happen. So as crazy and post-modern as it sounds to ask, is there .zip of the torrent files? :7)
posted by wenestvedt at 12:29 PM on March 11, 2016


Super yum. THANK you.
posted by Empty Planet at 12:29 PM on March 11, 2016


(Oh!! If you click "title," next to "View", then on the next page click the "hamburger" icon over on the right, you get this page, which is a text-only listing of all the tapes. Now that seems a little more manageable/searchable!)
posted by wenestvedt at 12:32 PM on March 11, 2016 [4 favorites]


All I can say is:

Wow.
posted by freakazoid at 12:55 PM on March 11, 2016


Also, it looks like it's been up on the Archive for almost three years, so maybe the various record companies don't really care. I hope they continue to not care.
posted by freakazoid at 1:03 PM on March 11, 2016 [2 favorites]


Dear Internet Archive:

I'm writing you on behalf of the Xiph.Org Foundation to inform you of our new 14 year-old lossless audio file format, the Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC)...
posted by enjoymoreradio at 1:06 PM on March 11, 2016 [1 favorite]


I'm surprised at how much I'm enjoying this - I went from super excited to "meh" when I read that they were commercially released recordings...but having music I love organized and announced is awfully nice.

koeselitz - I guess this goes back a little before online music, but are you familiar with the chronological classics or jazz tribune releases? I guess I never had any way to know if they had holes, but they sure seemed exhaustive. I have a jazz tribune disc of Fats Waller and his Rhythm that just phenomenal.

Oh, heck, while we're at it, don't forget about redhotjazz.com - or... oh, now that I click on it and my computer can't play a real audio file. ugh. lame. maybe forget about it.
posted by kevin is... at 1:15 PM on March 11, 2016


Dear Internet Archive:

I'm writing you on behalf of the Xiph.Org Foundation to inform you of our new 14 year-old lossless audio file format, the Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC)...


Good news, internet person - the files are also available from Archive.org as FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, MP3 VBR [LAME V2] and original WAV(E) files.

I think the original blurb is to indicate that these are sourced as .WAV files, uncompressed from the source cassettes.
posted by filthy light thief at 1:31 PM on March 11, 2016 [6 favorites]


Holy crap this is good. I'm binging on Fletcher Henderson right now. It took me about ten minutes to even decide where to start.
posted by charlesminus at 1:33 PM on March 11, 2016 [1 favorite]


Whoa.
posted by Jahaza at 1:54 PM on March 11, 2016


This is amazing.
posted by brennen at 2:51 PM on March 11, 2016


> This is amazing.

Exactly what I was about to say! Thanks very much for this post. Best of the Web indeed.
posted by languagehat at 2:54 PM on March 11, 2016


Wow so cool.
Thanks
posted by dougzilla at 3:04 PM on March 11, 2016


Oh Heavens to Murgatroyd.



If you just haven't heard the right one, it has got to be in here somewhere.
posted by louche mustachio at 4:55 PM on March 11, 2016 [2 favorites]


This is awesome. That is all. No, wait. Thank you!
posted by bardophile at 12:10 AM on March 12, 2016


Nice. :)

But what the difference with the "corrected" versions?
posted by Pouteria at 5:29 AM on March 12, 2016


We're gonna need more disk...
posted by PROD_TPSL at 8:59 AM on March 12, 2016


We're gonna need more disk...

Nah. Unless you are working at the pro level then getting the WAV or even the FLAC versions is serious overkill for old recordings like this, especially given they were taken from a cassette tape source.

The mp3 versions are 192 kbps, which is more than good enough, and will save you a shipload of disk space. Very few people could pick the difference.
posted by Pouteria at 9:28 AM on March 12, 2016


Screw disk space - I'm gonna need a whole new disk. I'm so afraid this resource will disappear. I'm still bruised from when Napster went down.
posted by charlesminus at 11:30 AM on March 12, 2016


Thanks very much, OP!

wenestvedt: is there .zip of the torrent files? :7)

I wanted this too! I couldn't see a built-in way of doing it, either. So I wrote a few lines of Python to download them semi-quickly.

I'm afraid I haven't checked thoroughly for duplicates or missing files, but there are 631 unique .torrent files including the "Catalogue & Notes", which matches the archive.org item count.

Anyone/everyone: PM me if you would like a .zip of .torrents. :)
posted by Quagkapi at 7:00 AM on March 13, 2016 [1 favorite]


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