Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project — The perfect downloads for that iPOD of yours! The perfect solution to dreary modern music.
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.
Little known to who? Google has hundreds of sites about this.
related links:
More dreadful recordings from another collector
Site for Collectors
National Park Service Edison Site
Want to record on one of these devices? These maniacs here still make blank cylinders.
I also like how old player-piano rolls are being scanned into midi-format files.
http://members.shaw.ca/smythe/archive.htm
Well it’s only a matter of time before they are sued for copyright violations!