5 ms·

I've thought about this quite a bit. I'm a big fan of the record label Bear Family, a German label that specializes in releasing boxsets from R&B/Rock&Roll/Coun

by Exmoor 3y ago

I've thought about this quite a bit. I'm a big fan of the record label Bear Family, a German label that specializes in releasing boxsets from R&B/Rock&Roll/Country artists from the 20's-70's. Want to hear every song The Carter Family ever recorded in their original incarnation? They have a 12 CD boxset for you! They generally do this be acquiring the original master tapes from the labels, which often include a lot of previously unreleased songs or alternate takes, and remastering them. Hip-Hop probably has a higher percentage of this material than almost any other genre, especially once you get to the mixtape/blog era. Unfortunately, most of this material was only released in unofficial forms, often on low-quality MP3s and often with some random dude shouting over the intro. A lot of these tracks were also recorded over unlicensed beats/samples, so even if clean recordings were available official release would be impossible.

michaelt 3y ago
> Unfortunately, most of this material was only released in unofficial forms, often on low-quality MP3s and often with some random dude shouting over the intro. If that's the art form as it was experienced, do archivists need to make a "better" version?
- Exmoor 3y ago
  I get your point, but I absolutely do prefer to hear older recordings where they have been able to in some way improve the quality over what was initially released. An extreme case would be some of the old 78rpm records that recent innovations have been able to clean up substantially. While the hip-hop records I'm talking about are not nearly that bad, the releases were often made in 128kbps with whatever encoder was available. Some may even have been transcoded.
- wahnfrieden 3y ago
  It is those very versions which need preserving if that is what exists
- tyre 3y ago
  This is like asking if a recording of the 1996 Olympics should have to include all of the commercials. For historical purposes, sure, have that as an option, but lil wayne's mixtapes are not better off for the random DJs or website advertisements yelled over them. That's not the music he made.
  - w-ll 3y ago
    Lil Wayne does have producer tags on his offical mixtaps, its just a lot of sites add their own crap even on top of that.
WesternMAGeek 3y ago
Bear Family is amazing! I have a bunch of their box sets. Pure archival gold - including Jerry Lee Lewis making really crude jokes in between takes of a song. We need a Bear Family equivalent for hip-hop!
whinenot 3y ago
> A lot of these tracks were also recorded over unlicensed beats/samples That's the killer, right there. For example, the Beastie Boys album Paul's Boutique probably could not be released today as it samples an incredible number of other artists.[0] [0]https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7kI8XoDoiHcrG0aGmtvq1g https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7kI8XoDoiHcrG0aGmtvq1g
- zhengyi13 3y ago
  On a similar note, Danger Mouse's "The Grey Album" remixing Jay Z's The Black Album over samples from The Beatles' White Album... Amazing. It's pretty findable, but it's unfortunate that there's no canonical source.
  - waldothedog 3y ago
    Somewhere I have a dead iPod shuffle with the grey album on it. Listened to that non stop in undergrad. Have not been able to find another bootleg of it :(
    - zhengyi13 3y ago
      I know I'm late here, but YouTube has 'em; you can ask for it by name.
  - lawgimenez 3y ago
    I have an old mp3 Wu-Tang vs The Beatles, I think it is not available on streaming. Not sure if the same artist who remixed it but it was fire.
- dendrite9 3y ago
  The original shows is available on mixcloud for anyone who wants to hear any of the interesting commentary that went with the playlist. It looks like the It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back Breakdown is up too, but I can't see the De La Soul one. https://www.kexp.org/breakdown/paulsboutique/ https://www.kexp.org/breakdown/paulsboutique/ https://www.kexp.org/breakdown/publicenemy30/ https://www.kexp.org/breakdown/publicenemy30/
lostlogin 3y ago
> Unfortunately, most of this material was only released in unofficial forms, often on low-quality MP3s I know nothing about audio - is it possible to upscale the quality somehow? Improve the quality via some process?
- jl6 3y ago
  Technically no, pragmatically maybe… If the information has been lost through using a lossy codec like MP3, there’s no getting it back. But there are “AI upscaling” techniques that use models to fill in the missing pieces. It isn’t really restoring the original, more like painting over a crack in a style that is typically used by similar artists in similar contexts. Such models could produce a result conceptually similar to what a cover band might produce.
- giantrobot 3y ago
  Audio compression literally throws out data. It's audio the human ear isn't likely/able to hear but it's still gone. Different codecs and even different implementations of codecs throw out different audio data. Any sort of upscaling is going to involve a lot of guesses about what was thrown out. For every codec and implementation there will be a lot of possibilities of what the original data might have looked like. At the end of the process you likely aren't going to get a result that necessarily sounds better than the low quality encoding. There will likely be a lot of artifacts introduced by the upscaling. It's not impossible but something you'd need a specially trained AI to do I would think.
  - lostlogin 3y ago
    I work with a system which extrapolates data in the frequency domain to reduce noise in medical images and then doubles the images resolution in the x and y direction (so 4x the pixels). It’s absolutely amazing. It’ll be interesting to see if audio ever gets a similar treatment and in what areas it can be applied.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
      Noise levels in contemporary audio is vanishingly small, and has not really been the target of any audio technology for quite a long time. Of course, restoration of older recordings is a separate issue, and that technology is 20-30 years old, at least (and very, very good).

by Exmoor 3y ago

michaelt 3y ago

> Unfortunately, most of this material was only released in unofficial forms, often on low-quality MP3s and often with some random dude shouting over the intro. If that's the art form as it was experienced, do archivists need to make a "better" version?

Exmoor 3y ago
I get your point, but I absolutely do prefer to hear older recordings where they have been able to in some way improve the quality over what was initially released. An extreme case would be some of the old 78rpm records that recent innovations have been able to clean up substantially. While the hip-hop records I'm talking about are not nearly that bad, the releases were often made in 128kbps with whatever encoder was available. Some may even have been transcoded.
wahnfrieden 3y ago
It is those very versions which need preserving if that is what exists
tyre 3y ago
This is like asking if a recording of the 1996 Olympics should have to include all of the commercials. For historical purposes, sure, have that as an option, but lil wayne's mixtapes are not better off for the random DJs or website advertisements yelled over them. That's not the music he made.
- w-ll 3y ago
  Lil Wayne does have producer tags on his offical mixtaps, its just a lot of sites add their own crap even on top of that.

WesternMAGeek 3y ago

Bear Family is amazing! I have a bunch of their box sets. Pure archival gold - including Jerry Lee Lewis making really crude jokes in between takes of a song. We need a Bear Family equivalent for hip-hop!

whinenot 3y ago

> A lot of these tracks were also recorded over unlicensed beats/samples That's the killer, right there. For example, the Beastie Boys album Paul's Boutique probably could not be released today as it samples an incredible number of other artists.[0] [0]https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7kI8XoDoiHcrG0aGmtvq1g https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7kI8XoDoiHcrG0aGmtvq1g

zhengyi13 3y ago
On a similar note, Danger Mouse's "The Grey Album" remixing Jay Z's The Black Album over samples from The Beatles' White Album... Amazing. It's pretty findable, but it's unfortunate that there's no canonical source.
- waldothedog 3y ago
  Somewhere I have a dead iPod shuffle with the grey album on it. Listened to that non stop in undergrad. Have not been able to find another bootleg of it :(
  - zhengyi13 3y ago
    I know I'm late here, but YouTube has 'em; you can ask for it by name.
- lawgimenez 3y ago
  I have an old mp3 Wu-Tang vs The Beatles, I think it is not available on streaming. Not sure if the same artist who remixed it but it was fire.
dendrite9 3y ago
The original shows is available on mixcloud for anyone who wants to hear any of the interesting commentary that went with the playlist. It looks like the It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back Breakdown is up too, but I can't see the De La Soul one. https://www.kexp.org/breakdown/paulsboutique/ https://www.kexp.org/breakdown/paulsboutique/ https://www.kexp.org/breakdown/publicenemy30/ https://www.kexp.org/breakdown/publicenemy30/

lostlogin 3y ago

> Unfortunately, most of this material was only released in unofficial forms, often on low-quality MP3s I know nothing about audio - is it possible to upscale the quality somehow? Improve the quality via some process?

jl6 3y ago
Technically no, pragmatically maybe… If the information has been lost through using a lossy codec like MP3, there’s no getting it back. But there are “AI upscaling” techniques that use models to fill in the missing pieces. It isn’t really restoring the original, more like painting over a crack in a style that is typically used by similar artists in similar contexts. Such models could produce a result conceptually similar to what a cover band might produce.
giantrobot 3y ago
Audio compression literally throws out data. It's audio the human ear isn't likely/able to hear but it's still gone. Different codecs and even different implementations of codecs throw out different audio data. Any sort of upscaling is going to involve a lot of guesses about what was thrown out. For every codec and implementation there will be a lot of possibilities of what the original data might have looked like. At the end of the process you likely aren't going to get a result that necessarily sounds better than the low quality encoding. There will likely be a lot of artifacts introduced by the upscaling. It's not impossible but something you'd need a specially trained AI to do I would think.
- lostlogin 3y ago
  I work with a system which extrapolates data in the frequency domain to reduce noise in medical images and then doubles the images resolution in the x and y direction (so 4x the pixels). It’s absolutely amazing. It’ll be interesting to see if audio ever gets a similar treatment and in what areas it can be applied.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
    Noise levels in contemporary audio is vanishingly small, and has not really been the target of any audio technology for quite a long time. Of course, restoration of older recordings is a separate issue, and that technology is 20-30 years old, at least (and very, very good).