Volunteers turn a fan's recordings of 10K concerts into an online treasure trove
apnews.com291 points by geox 3 days ago
291 points by geox 3 days ago
https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection
The Nirvana gig mentioned is 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
Just 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
Before then heroine and fame took over Kurt
The 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.
Interesting! Cleaning up digitized recordings or starting from the tape source?
Cassettes 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.
Interestingly, 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....
(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.)
Both.
Grateful Dead has analog reel-to-reel recordings going back to the 60's but most of those have been digitized already or are in the Deads vault.
There are also large collections of recordings on Betamax cassettes made with Sony PCM-F1 digital front-ends which were used before DAT become available. These are digitized versions of old analog recordings and original digital recordings from the 80's. They need transferring and sample rate conversion (they are 44.056kHz) and in some cases pre-emphasis removal.
There is also a lot of digital material on DAT cassettes including analog transfers and digital recordings from the 90s. There are also some CD-Rs where original sources can't be found.
A lot of the cleanup is just figuring out what comes from what show and substituting sources where there are gaps to make complete versions for listening. The archival nature of the endeavor usually limits the amount of "clean up" that is done.
"... 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aadam_Jacobs
He began to attend and record 15 concerts each month, and has said "It went pretty quickly from just being an occasional thing to something I did far too often."
So his average is every other day. Also, most concerts / shows have more than one act. I went to an MF DOOM show back in the day at a small club with FIVE opening acts, and then DOOM had THREE more openers in his set time. That's 9 total acts on one night. Even the sprawling wu-tang tour last year had run the jewels as an opener.
Shout 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.
You can just say the thing, you don't have to comment on everyone who got it wrong.
I saw Aadam at almost every show I went to in the early aughts, and he recorded a few of my shows, too! Great guy!
Did he come from an old-money wealthy family? How did he find the time and money to be an unofficial cultural archivist?
This 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.
I 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.
i've always been impressed by the work put into the nine inch nails live archive https://ninlive.com (and the tour history site as well https://www.nintourhistory.com )
Also https://nindata.io/tours and will all be put up on GitHub soon including data
https://www.nintourhistory.com is great too, you can make an account and see personalized stats
Yeah I love these sites. Wish the data would all be opened up for the nerds!
Just 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.
Absolutely 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.
Found a few bands whose names I recognise. :)
* Midnight Oil: 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. :)
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* Tracy Chapman: 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. :)
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* Ben Folds Five: https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=c...
* R.E.M: https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=c...
* Björk: https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=c...
* Born to Run: https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=c...
* Captain of Industry: https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=c...
* Depeche Mode: https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=c...
* Lemonheads: https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=c...
* Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: https://archive.org/details/aadamjacobs?and[]=creator%3A%22n...
* Nirvana: https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=c...
* Sonic Youth: https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=c...
* Suzanne Vega: https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=c...
* The Bangles: https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=c...
* The Cure: https://archive.org/details/@aadam_jacobs_collection?and[]=c...
> Tracy Chapman: 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. :)
Fast Car was terrific, thanks for sharing! It is especially amazing considering this recording was made in 1988, just one month and one day (how poetic!) after Fast Car was released as a single.
Yeah. :)
"Talkin' Bout A Revolution" is in there as well, and some stuff marked as "unreleased".
The entire Tracy Chapman recording there is actually really well put together. The volunteers who did the work to transfer it from cassette and clean it up, did an outstanding job on this one.
> Recorded by: Aadam Jacobs
> Transferred by: Brian E
> Mastered by: Dennis Orr
There are several Dinosaur Jr recordings, two from the late 80s / early 90s, of which this is the best one: https://archive.org/details/ajc02597_dinosaur-jr-1993-04-10 The other has the better set list (IMHO!) but unfortunately a very "thin" recording with only mids.
No Pixies, but The Amps have one appearance: https://archive.org/details/ajc02207_amps1995-10-31 The performance is ... "uneven"
And four stunning Guided by Voices sets, of which the best is https://archive.org/details/ajc00711_gbv-1999-12-10/GBV1999-...
It is an utterly amazing collection, although not the era I am the most familiar with. However, let me add a few as I love your initiative and went through them all and skimmed the ones below to get a sense of the quality.
Billy Bragg:
* https://archive.org/details/ajc02362_bbragg1986-12-04.ajcpro...
* https://archive.org/details/ajc02359_bbragg1988-05-06.ajcpro...
Not the cleanest vocals on either of the recordings, but the former is overall higher quality from what I could tell.
Boogie Down Productions:
* https://archive.org/details/ajc02338_bdp1988-05-18
Excellent recording and great live act, just a pity that it is rather short.
Mojo Nixon:
* https://archive.org/details/ajc02226_mojonixon-skidroper1987...
Another great live act and recording. I am sure Mojo would very much approve of this being shared as well.
Glad they're uploading it publicly and not to some private torrent trackers like Concertos
this reminds me of the old internet
I 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.
It'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.
Yes, in the old low bandwidth days i participated in some live concert snail-mail CD swap online mailing lists / forums
2001 era internet vibes, what is this doing here in 2026 haha??
I remember when a collection like this had to be kept secret, otherwise the recording labels would sue. Nobody cares anymore?
These are all almost 10 years old, many are 20 or 30 or even 40 years old. Time makes a big difference.
There's a 2004 article about the taper [0] posted elsewhere in the thread, he definitely did get into a bit of trouble at the time.
> When he got back from England, Shanahan–who’d known Jacobs’s family for years–lectured him, warning him always to get clearance from bands before recording them and to be careful when trading tapes. Soon after this, though, Jacobs snuck his gear into a Bob Mould solo gig at Metro–he’d been unable to get permission, Shanahan says–and was caught by venue staff. Shanahan didn’t let him on the premises again for six years, relenting only after Jacobs got Flaming Lips manager Scott Booker to plead his case.
I 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.
Everybody 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.)
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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.
So if my maths is right, 10K concerts over ~ 40 years - this guy was at a concert 5 nights a week every week?
Sounds like they might have been working the gigs? Maybe a sounds engineer
Just a fan who became well known and often got in for free - https://chicagoreader.com/music/tapehead/
Some 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.
The stuff that never got officially released is always the most interesting. Live recordings capture something the studio versions were never trying to.
Wait until people discover Zappateers...