The Cylinder Preservation Project at the University of California.

Cylinder 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.

… 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.

… 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.

The site carries a CC-licence and a short rundown on state vs common-law copyrights. Fresh site. Over 5000 tracks converted from cylinder to digital so far (not all to MP3 yet). Via Creative Commons weblog.

Wed, 23 Nov 2005