Internet Archive: Music? Music!
Thanks to Chris Pirillo pointing out the Internet Archive’s Live Music Archive, I’m now sitting here listening to “The Fools We Are as Men” from an incredible live performance of Ryan Adams in Paris with indescribable recording quality. There are a huge number of bands and shows available in the archive, but most of the best ones are done in “lossless” audio, so these are some big files, which is a bit of a downside. There are some MP3s, but most of them are Shorten files.
Shorten is an attempt to make high-quality lossless audio recordings available without needing a ton of bandwidth. (Just a half-ton of bandwidth.) From the little experience I have, a typical SHN file is about two to three times smaller than its counterpart WAV original.
You’ll notice right away if you compare the Live Music Archive’s selection of MP3s vs. its selection of Shorten files. Most of what’s there is not in good ole MP3. At first, I you might feel a little disillusioned by this. But don’t let a new file format keep you from enjoying a ton of wonderful live recordings from bands and artists like Ben Kweller, Spoon, Ryan Adams (21 shows), Jack Johnson (89 shows), Guster (131 shows!), Howie Day (185 shows!!), and much, much more. Plus, you’ll get our exclusive collecti– oh. Sorry. I thought I was doing an infomercial.
Anyway, if you like music, you probably enjoy (well recorded) live music. I know that I do. I have over 6 GB of MP3s of live recordings from Ben Folds /Five, Dave Matthews, Weezer, and a few others.
What you need to enjoy sonic liveness:
For playing the SHN files and/or converting them to MP3, you have two reasonable options: (1) Install ShnAmp, which will allow you to play them in Winamp upon download, or (2) [My recommendation] Download and install MKW Audio Compression Tool (mkwACT) to have a two-step drag-and-drop conversion from SHN to MP3 files. If you choose this route, note the additional installation instructions (primarily, you need to first install the binaries and not click “OK” when finished installing them until after completing the program installation, as well as check the options settings in MKWACT after you’ve installed it.)