National Jukebox

[coleb13]

The Library of Congress announced this week the initial results of their National Jukebox project, the creation of digital versions of some of the historic music recordings in their collection and the making of them available to the public via the internet (http://www.loc.gov/jukebox/). Initially there are 10,000 Victor recordings from 1901-1925.

 

I thought it was interesting that they decided to make 2-channel 24-bit 96-KHz digital recordings of these 78 r.p.m. mono disks for archival purposes. They then derive CD-quality versions and the streaming audio files that they post on the web site from those. These historic recordings didn't have any cover art or liner notes to preserve, but the library has created 400 d.p.i. TIFF images of the record labels, from which they created smaller JPEGs and thumbnails for the web site.

 

I've been having fun listening to some of the recordings, hearing in many cases the original recordings of some very well-known songs.