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Volunteers turn a fan's recordings of 10K concerts into an online treasure trove
- rwmj 7mo agohttps://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection The Nirvana gig mentioned is https://archive.org/details/ajc00795_nirvana-1989-07-08 https://archive.org/details/ajc00795_nirvana-1989-07-08 The quality is surprisingly good for a bootleg and the band are super-tight! Donate to the IA here: https://archive.org/donate https://archive.org/donate
- rashkov 7mo agoJust got an email this morning saying my monthly $3 donation went through, and this article reminded me how the internet archive is truly the internet’s library and very worthwhile to support
- MidnightRider39 7mo agoIt’s one of the few (the only?) org that I donate to without second thoughts
- piker 7mo agoBefore then heroine and fame took over Kurt
- pimlottc 7mo agoYou (probably) mean “heroin”
- costcopizza 7mo agoDefinitely heroine.
- jgrowl 7mo agoA barbarous Floydian slip.
- ufocia 7mo agoHe probably meant Courtney Love
- piker 7mo agolol! yes, typo. I don't blame her, but man Freud might disagree. Reading that comment again (which I can't edit now), I would like to make it clear I was just responding to the OP's note that the bad was super tight in that set.
- justinclift 7mo agoFound a few bands whose names I recognise. :) * Midnight Oil: https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=creator%3A%22midnight%20oil%22 https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=c... This one has a fairly decent quality recording of "Beds are Burning" too. Australian Classic Rock. :) --- * Tracy Chapman: https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=creator%3A%22tracy%20chapman%22 https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=c... Audio quality is decent here too. Listening to "Fast Car" now, and the quality is solid. :) --- * Ben Folds Five: https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=creator%3A%22ben%20folds%20five%22 https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=c... * R.E.M: https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=creator%3A%22r.e.m.%22 https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=c... * Björk: https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=creator%3A%22bj%C3%B6rk%22 https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=c... * Born to Run: https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=creator%3A%22born%20to%20run%22 https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=c... * Captain of Industry: https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=creator%3A%22captain%20of%20industry%22 https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=c... * Depeche Mode: https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=creator%3A%22depeche%20mode%22 https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=c... * Lemonheads: https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=creator%3A%22lemonheads%22 https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=c... * Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: https://archive.org/details/aadamjacobs?and[]=creator%3A%22nick%20cave%20%26%20the%20bad%20seeds%22&and[]=creator%3A%22nick%20cave%20and%20the%20bad%20seeds%22 https://archive.org/details/aadamjacobs?and[]=creator%3A%22n... * Nirvana: https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=creator%3A%22nirvana%22 https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=c... * Sonic Youth: https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=creator%3A%22sonic%20youth%22 https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=c... * Suzanne Vega: https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=creator%3A%22suzanne%20vega%22 https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=c... * The Bangles: https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=creator%3A%22the%20bangles%22 https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=c... * The Cure: https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=creator%3A%22the%20cure%22 https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=c...
- exossho 7mo agothis reminds me of the old internet
- menno-sh 7mo agoI don't know, I also feel like 'data hoarding' is something that's been getting more popular in recent years. Maybe because the ephemerality of the internet is starting to show.
- farfatched 7mo agoIt's not the data hoarding that reminds me of the old Internet. It's one person's curated collection. It's it being made available for the sake of it. It's novel, unexpected. a gift.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- slim 7mo agoor maybe AI behemoths are driving demand
- steveBK123 7mo agoYes, in the old low bandwidth days i participated in some live concert snail-mail CD swap online mailing lists / forums
- throwaway2046 7mo agoAbsolutely amazing collection, and it has lossless FLACs too! Many thanks to the fans and IA for making this possible. Remember to donate and help keep the Internet Archive alive.
- ktallett 7mo agoSome fantastic albums here. Clearly dedicated to his craft of recording. There are still a few quality bootleg bloggers out there that give me hope the web can still be special and enjoyable.
- bsenftner 7mo agoI remember when a collection like this had to be kept secret, otherwise the recording labels would sue. Nobody cares anymore?
- dzdt 7mo agoI think the new model with music is they don't make a very serious attempt to keep a monopoly on the content. They only really care about a monopoly on convenience. If anyone would set up some convenient way to stream these concert recordings they would get sued to oblivion. But the recordings circulating as inconvenient downloads? Not a big target.
- pessimizer 7mo agoEverybody still cares, so you should get them while they last. Nobody who cares has noticed and maybe won't notice for a while, or it won't be in the budget to go after IA after just hitting them. The only protection these probably have is that they are recordings of real bands, and the bands that later became corporate darlings are in the minority - and labels like Touch & Go and other Midwest indies not only probably don't exist anymore and are not interested, but also don't control any of the publishing for the people who put out albums on their labels. But the ones playing the music are all very old people now, and many of them have likely sold their publishing to the our blob overlords for a pittance. If massive multinational media corporations can make it difficult to figure out what they might have a claim to, it will end up easier to take the whole thing down. They attacked IA last time based on wax cylinders. The reason orgs like the RIAA exist is to take PR hits for the industry; they will eventually demand they be taken down and probably make claims based on the length of time they were hosted. Get what you want while you can, although if you're a Millennial/Gen Z hipster you won't know any of it because it wasn't marketed to you (or anyone, it was just music, we enjoyed it.) ----- edit: Looking through the list, I remembered how awful Chicago shows at the big clubs were, how Metro banned punk rock, and how I only ever went to those places to see touring bands that managed to get an opening spot for some A&R industry plant. Most of these are not good, and tons of them have all of their publishing owned by multinationals. It's the kind of selection you'd expect from somebody who thought that Bleach-era Nirvana was just alright and stalked Pavement. Was happy to see a bunch of Fireside Bowl shows, but it looks like he dodged the good ones. This is almost pure "indy." I bet anybody could still find 100 that they'd like though so I don't want to seem too negative. This is mostly Gen X mainstream suburban hipster music.
- Myzel394 7mo agoGlad they're uploading it publicly and not to some private torrent trackers like Concertos
- sassymuffinz 7mo agoSo if my maths is right, 10K concerts over ~ 40 years - this guy was at a concert 5 nights a week every week?
- jgtrosh 7mo agoSounds like they might have been working the gigs? Maybe a sounds engineer
- philk10 7mo agoJust a fan who became well known and often got in for free - https://chicagoreader.com/music/tapehead/ https://chicagoreader.com/music/tapehead/
- scrame 7mo agoConcerts usually have more than one act.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- selfsimilar 7mo agoI saw Aadam at almost every show I went to in the early aughts, and he recorded a few of my shows, too! Great guy!
- da02 7mo agoDid he come from an old-money wealthy family? How did he find the time and money to be an unofficial cultural archivist?
- textfiles 7mo agoHe just really, really, really committed himself.
- Underphil 7mo ago“I was using, at times, pretty lackluster equipment, simply because I had no money to buy anything better,” he said. Later, he moved on to digital audio tape, or DAT, and, as technology progressed, to solid-state digital recorders."
- mannyv 7mo agoThe team needs to talk to Charlie miller et al, the ones who have been cleaning up and posting the grateful dead archive for the last few decades. They are audio magicians.
- derwiki 7mo agoInteresting! Cleaning up digitized recordings or starting from the tape source?
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- rectang 7mo agoCassettes are a pain. Head alignment is extremely important for analog tape fidelity, and it's always off for home recordings. With pro analog tape recordings (e.g. 2-inch 24 track, half-inch 2-track), you record alignment tones onto the tapes to capture the state of the recording device, and then later calibrate the playback device to the particular tape so that playback alignment matches recording alignment. But this is essentially never done with cassettes, so you have to earball it. Cassette players for mastering studios actually have alignment options (e.g. adjustable azimuth) that aren't present on consumer devices. But without the tones, you have to guess. The problem with starting from a digitized source is that it may have been digitized from non-aligned playback. Ideally you want to go back to the analog originals - but old cassettes are rarely in perfect condition.
- ssl-3 7mo agoInterestingly, the Nakamichi Dragon is/was a cassette deck that can do automatic azimuth adjustment on playback -- without having recorded tones to work with. In loose terms: It does this with a special read head that splits one of the recorded tracks into 2 distinct signals (for a total of 3 signals from 1 stereo recording). The split tracks' signals are compared, and it adjusts the azimuth (by minutely rotating the head) until the signals from the split track match most-perfectly. A better overview is found in this sales flyer: https://www.richardhess.com/manuals/Nakamichi/dragon_folder.pdf https://www.richardhess.com/manuals/Nakamichi/dragon_folder.... (Take note of the pictures of the machine. If anyone finds one sitting around at a flea market or in a forgotten pile of old junk, please rescue it. Nothing like this will ever be manufactured again. Even if the condition is "it looks like someone went after it with a big hammer as part of their anger management process," the bits that remain still have significant value and are easy to sell.)
- soumyaskartha 7mo agoThe stuff that never got officially released is always the most interesting. Live recordings capture something the studio versions were never trying to.
- xnobodyx 7mo agoi've always been impressed by the work put into the nine inch nails live archive https://ninlive.com https://ninlive.com (and the tour history site as well https://www.nintourhistory.com https://www.nintourhistory.com )
- istajeer242 7mo agoAlso https://nindata.io/tours https://nindata.io/tours and will all be put up on GitHub soon including data
- pimlottc 7mo agohttps://www.nintourhistory.com https://www.nintourhistory.com is great too, you can make an account and see personalized stats
- istajeer242 7mo agoYeah I love these sites. Wish the data would all be opened up for the nerds!
- steveBK123 7mo agoThis snippet is funny: > “Especially after the first couple years, he’s got it so dialed in that some of these recordings, on, like, crappy little cassette tapes from the early 90s, sound incredible,” deMause said. I think in some ways we’ve come full circle such that it doesn’t matter.. because people are listening to various compressed streaming music sources, with loudness-wars mixing, output to airpods, phone speakers, laptop speakers, and all sorts of suboptimal listening devices.
- flyingcircus3 7mo agoI think you're conflating lossy encoding degrading fidelity with the main problem that plagues most audience recordings: the crowd is in the foreground and the band is in the background. One is nearly imperceptible to most people that haven't spent decades in studios like Neil Young, and the other is immediately obvious to everyone.
- bookofjoe 7mo ago"... fan's recordings of 10k concerts..." 59-year-old Aadam [sic] Jacobs made his first recording 42 years ago in 1984 when he was 17. He would have had to average 238 recordings/concerts per year — nearly 5/week — over those 42 years to accumulate 10,000 of them.
- MidnightRider39 7mo agoIf you check the collection most nights had ~3 bands playing
- dec0dedab0de 7mo agothey may count the opening acts as separate concerts
- bookofjoe 7mo agoThis is disposative.
- bookofjoe 7mo agoLook it up
- scw 7mo agoThey're unlikely to find much unless they instead try “dispositive”.
- bookofjoe 7mo agoYikes! Corrected. Thank you.
- jamiek88 7mo agoSpell it correctly. An arrogant anesthesiologist is boring cliche by the way. It’s this likely site has many, many people considerably smarter than you. Turn down the arrogance no one gives a shit what you used to be able to do.
- TrailingArbutus 7mo ago2001 era internet vibes, what is this doing here in 2026 haha??
- textfiles 7mo agoShout out to everyone in this thread who seem unable to understand a club might have three unrelated acts on, so each performance is called a "concert" under this collection. Aadam and the crew are focused on making each performance a separate entity instead of grouping them up. Substitute "performance" for "concert" if it helps. Carry on.
- pwr1 7mo agoJust lost an hour going through this. Found a Nirvana show from 1989 at Dreamerz. The recording quality is surprisingly decent for a cassette tape. This is exactly the kind of thing the internet was supposed to be for.
- dancemethis 7mo agoWait until people discover Zappateers...
- DM70 7mo agoIt is genuinely hard to create anything in the music area now, even music itself. I grew up as a kid when music reached its peak and started declining - 1990s-2000s. Frankly, it i very sad because new generation is missing on something very big and good now. I listen to some new stuff and its literally created for robots, not humans. I call it zombie music because it is hard to recognize the difference between artist or band - they often us literally the same melody and phrases. I am not sure if tech industry can resolve this problem - the world is losing its music soul. Hence, that's why concerts are possible way to go - back to the ancient basics - personal performance wins - because you see actual perosn doing it and you either get very engage dor not.
- MDCore 7mo agoYou might find this paper interesting: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11002-022-09626-7 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11002-022-09626-7 ".. preferences for popular music peak during early adolescence or mid-to-late teens, and that newer or older tracks do not command this same level of affection." Most people generally don't like new music because it doesn't evoke the same emotions as what we heard at that heightened period of our lives. Musicians haven't stopped wanting to make music and doing whatever it takes to make it, and commercial interests want to profit from that just like they did back then. There's so much good music being put out all the time, in new and old-fashioned ways.
- grokys 7mo agoThis. GP is just old. I'm 51 one now and almost everyone I know seems to think the same thing. Unless you work at it, music later in life will never evoke the same emotions as those from when you were in your late teens/early 20s. Thing is though, it's really not true and if you work at it you realise pretty quickly that music today is just as good as it was at any time in the last 50 years (though I will concede that we'll probably never get the highs of the late 60s and early 70s ever again - if you were a teenager then, ok. Music now is definitely better than in the 80s though dude).
- lostlogin 7mo agoAs rule, reading the comments on an article is a terrible idea. But quichelorraine123 had a good one. “...I heard you have a compilation of every good song ever done by anybody. Every great song by the Beach Boys. All the underground hits. All the Modern Lovers tracks. I heard you have a vinyl of every Niagra record on German import. I heard that you have a white label of every seminal Detroit techno hit - 1985, '86, '87. I heard that you have a CD compilation of every good '60s cut and another box set from the '70s…” …excerpt of lyrics from LCD Soundsystem's Losing My Edge”
- forgotmypw17 7mo agoDoes anyone know how to find the hiphop/rap shows?
- inatreecrown2 7mo agoOne recording mentioned in the article: https://archive.org/details/ajc02338_bdp1988-05-18 https://archive.org/details/ajc02338_bdp1988-05-18
- rurban 6mo agoPavement played 27 songs! Excellent quality. https://archive.org/details/ajc03159_pavement-1997-02-17/Pavement1997-02-17t02.flac https://archive.org/details/ajc03159_pavement-1997-02-17/Pav...