На информационном ресурсе применяются рекомендательные технологии (информационные технологии предоставления информации на основе сбора, систематизации и анализа сведений, относящихся к предпочтениям пользователей сети "Интернет", находящихся на территории Российской Федерации)

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A Wayback Machine for Early 20th Century Tunes

A gramophone playing a 78.
A gramophone playing a 78.

The Internet Archive’s name can be a little misleading. Sure, it’s preserving large swaths of the internet with its Wayback Machine and you can still play Oregon Trail online with its MS-DOS emulator, but it’s also archiving physical media that never lived on any server, even as it transfers the contents into its massive digital bank.

The nonprofit digital library has an impressive collection millions of books and about 200,000 shellac discs engraved with rare music from the early 20th century.

“We’re trying to make sure the physical object is saved, as well as the digital, because we don’t know which will last longer,” says B. George, the sound collections curator at the Internet Archive. “When information disappears digitally, it’s gone forever.” If you’ve ever had a hard drive crash, you know this all too well. Storing and preserving the physical media behind all of that information—if it exists—is one way to future-proof the archive. We may someday lose the ability to digitally play back certain file formats (though the Archive is working on that, too), but we’ll always be able to cobble together a machine with a needle and a horn that can play a record, if you can keep that record in good shape.

The shellac discs in the Archive’s Richmond, California, warehouse are the precursors to the 12-inch vinyl records that became popular in the mid-20th century. Invented by Emile Berliner in 1887, the discs came in different sizes and materials, including rubber, until the industry eventually settled on 10-inch discs made of shellac that were played on gramophones (originally Berliner’s patented variation on Thomas Edison’s phonograph) at 78 revolutions per minute, with about three minutes of music on each side. By today’s audiophilic standards, these “78s” sound pretty rough, with plenty of hissing, clicks, and crackling. The shellac, a resin produced by the lac insect native to parts of Asia, was mixed with fillers, including finely ground rock, to make the fragile records a bit more durable and affordable. The fillers don’t do much for playback quality, though, and the earliest 78s sound much worse than ones produced later, when companies had refined their filler mixtures. Finding pristine 78s made with high-quality fillers is…

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