Saturday, August 23, 2008

Digitised 78s


Wired reports: [edited]

Thousands of recordings that had been largely consigned to the realm of prehistory in the digital age have gained a new life, thanks to the tireless efforts of one man.

Cliff Bolling didn't realize what he was getting into when he picked up a copy of the first record he ever owned (Cliff Steward's "Aba Daba Honeymoon") and realized soon after that "there's a whole world of music that you don't hear anymore, and it's on 78 RPM records."

As things stand now, the 57-year-old Portland, Oregon, native has uploaded 3,739 MP3s, with plenty more in the pipeline.

"A lot of younger people go to the site, and it's amazing that they hear songs today that originally were recorded 75 years ago. It's pretty cool that people get to listen to this stuff. As far as copyrights, apparently I'm okay, because nobody's come to shut me down or anything."

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Brett's 2p'orth: Sadly, Bolling's site has been a victim of its own success, with hundreds of greedy downloaders sucking the entire 10GB of files off the site for their collections, Yahoo shut his site down. So, for now at least, the site is merely listing the songs, with a token 'free track' available for download. Shame.
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5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Priceless quotation in explanation:
"My web hosting program offers Unlimited Data Transfer, but the amount of data being transfered was greater than the unlimited amount I was alotted so they shut it down."

Brett Jordan said...

yep... looks like the dictionary definition of 'unlimited' is going to need some revising in the near future

Anonymous said...

It's amazing that one man could so selflessly attempt such a feat as trying to provide the latest generation with music from times gone past. It is a shame however that he couldn't keep the website going, it appears that indeed the dictionary reference for unlimited need be redefined. Silly providers keep mixing up the word unrestricted with unlimited the connotations to the average man being very similar however one denotes restrictions while the other does not. Still bandwidth costs money and money is not finite, at least not to one man and his record collection.

Brook Jordan said...

You mean... Money IS finite?
I'm sure he doesn't have infinite money :)

Brett Jordan said...

If you're not careful, you'll become a worse pedant than your father :-)

 
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