Amoeba is offering digital downloads from 78s

[medjuck]

A couple of years ago Terry Zwigoff told me that Amoeba was offering to digitize his entire 78 collection and put it on line.  At the time I wondered why but  I just discovered that  they sell digital downloads from  78s (not sure that these are from Terry's collection).  I presume that the ones they sell are all pd, but who knows. They offer 3 different formats at different prices for those who want higher fidelity.  I don 't know how to search them except by title or artist so I don't know how many they offer but if you're in  the market for some rare old recording.....

(BTW I discovered this when I Googled The Harlem Strut.) 

[bluenoter]

3 hours ago, medjuck said:

A couple of years ago Terry Zwigoff told me that Amoeba was offering to digitize his entire 78 collection and put it on line.  At the time I wondered why but  I just discovered that  they sell digital downloads from  78s (not sure that these are from Terry's collection).  I presume that the ones they sell are all pd, but who knows. They offer 3 different formats at different prices for those who want higher fidelity.  I don 't know how to search them except by title or artist so I don't know how many they offer but if you're in  the market for some rare old recording.....

(BTW I discovered this when I Googled The Harlem Strut.) 

Here's a link: http://www.amoeba.com/music/vinyl-vaults/#/

[Ted O'Reilly]

Has "vinyl" become the new word for "flat-spiral-recording"?  The amoeba site seems to think so, referring to 78s as "vinyl".

The samples sound pretty good, in a brief listening session.

Here's a site I check out now and then:  http://www.jazz-on-line.com/index.htm which offers mp3s free...

[tatifan]

At the quality the samples are offered at I find they range from barely adequate to downright awful!  They sound like rips from the worst possible cd transfers....IF they paid someone to do this work, they were ripped off. I'd much rather have something on the non-interventionist side of noise reduction (or at least NR competently applied and not slathered on like a syrup).  At those prices I'm not going to pay to find out what a WAV sounds like.  Find some way to buy downloads of some J.R.T. Davies transfers and you'll get 20-25 tracks for about 1/3 to a 1/4 of what these are going for and something that is a pleasure to listen to.