The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

Yep. Rather sad, but true.

Take the good info and data, gather it up, and then
lock it behind a paywall!

Lots of that going on everywhere.

Pay de' moneee. "How much for de' leetle girl?"...

(wanna buy a watch?)

<I add those things because it all reminds me of
those typical shady situations so much>

Marc Hildebrant wrote:At one time you could download the "raw" version of the song. They stopped doing that unless you pay them now.

Bandwidth and servers do cost money, after all.

Marc Hildebrant wrote:The files you can get now are only MP3 quality.
Marc

I wonder if this is really an issue, considering the original media, and the fact that the hosting of these files is "free".

Best,
Fran

With regard to MP3 vs wav or raw files...yes there is a difference even for these old songs. The MP3 process removes quite a bit of the original music. Check out some of the online sources to learn more.

For my music restoration work, I send out MP3 samples to people to let them hear the type of music I have, but when it's time to buy the music, I send them a CD from the wav files. You can hear a difference.

Marc

According to the Spectro app, the Archive files are 128 kbps MP3, which is fairly low bit rate. If they were the highest MP3 bitrate of 356 kpbs I would think that would be perfectly adequate for cylinders. Though even the 128 files are showing a high frequency cutoff of around 16 KHz, way beyond what any cylinder would have on it, it's all noise up there. I've never had much of an issue with the sound, even though they are not "raw" the amount of processing they do apply to the cylinders is tasteful, IMO.

I'm ordinarily no MP3 apologist when it comes to higher fidelity material. My personal music files are all FLAC, all the time. But, I'm not complaining about it too much. It wasn't so many years ago that - outside of amassing an enormous collection of cylinders yourself - one had to make do with spotty, infrequent LP reissues that often had far worse sound quality, AND, you had to actually buy them.

With regard to the MP3 files. Keep in mind that the processing is much more than just removing some of the high end sound.

Marc