[HN Gopher] Tinfoil.com - Dedicated to the preservation of early...
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       Tinfoil.com - Dedicated to the preservation of early recorded
       sounds
        
       Author : cenazoic
       Score  : 66 points
       Date   : 2024-11-11 22:41 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (tinfoil.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (tinfoil.com)
        
       | notpushkin wrote:
       | Some recordings on the website are RealMedia. I thought most
       | players supported that but apparently quite a few don't! So if
       | nothing else works for you, try ffplay.
       | 
       | (Curiously enough, Celluloid seems to play this and Haruna
       | doesn't, although both are wrappers for mpv.)
        
         | RunningDroid wrote:
         | > (Curiously enough, Celluloid seems to play this and Haruna
         | doesn't, although both are wrappers for mpv.)
         | 
         | I'm not familiar with how they wrap MPV, but it could be that
         | one uses MPV built against a library that provides support and
         | the other uses an MPV that's not built against that library
        
         | romanhn wrote:
         | I love the fact that an early digital format for sound
         | recordings is used here for early sound recordings. Fun fact -
         | RealNetworks is still around.
        
           | tombert wrote:
           | I knew that, but it always baffles me when I hear it again.
           | Who uses any Real products anymore?
           | 
           | Back in 2007 the only reason I ever used Real stuff was
           | pirated episodes of South Park, and even then I think I was
           | using Real Alternative. Even in 2007 the company seemed like
           | it was dying, and I have no idea 17 years later it's still
           | somehow alive.
        
             | nativeit wrote:
             | It appears they're mostly buying other companies and their
             | tech, with no apparent whales on either side of the ledger,
             | so they don't appear to be growing or failing at any great
             | pace.
        
             | giancarlostoro wrote:
             | I remember installing their software reluctantly
        
             | RandallBrown wrote:
             | I drive by their headquarters in Seattle pretty regularly
             | and always wonder the same thing.
        
             | gwbas1c wrote:
             | Wait, people were still using Real back in 2007? At that
             | point I had cycled through DivX, XviD, and then just
             | started holding onto the .VOB file from the DVD.
        
               | tombert wrote:
               | As I said, the only thing I used it for was pirated
               | episodes of South Park. For whatever reason, a lot of the
               | South Park piracy websites were using .rm files.
               | 
               | For literally everything else, I think I used XviD until
               | MakeMKV came along.
        
           | walterbell wrote:
           | Realplayer supported SMIL!
           | 
           | Realtime dynamic composition of video streams from multiple
           | servers with a few lines of XMl.
           | 
           | 20 years later, there's no alternative.
        
         | autoexec wrote:
         | > Some recordings on the website are RealMedia. I thought most
         | players supported that but apparently quite a few don't!
         | 
         | VLC works, as usual.
        
       | ejstronge wrote:
       | From a different era, but still early in recorded history, you
       | may enjoy the Excavated Shellac collection
       | (https://excavatedshellac.com/) by Jonathan Ward.
       | 
       | Please share other collections if you know of any!
        
       | beAbU wrote:
       | Very cool.
       | 
       | We're coming up to 150 years of being able to record and preserve
       | the sounds of the world around us.
       | 
       | The era of ubiquitous digital recording is probably only really
       | 30-40 years old, so there is a real incentive to preserve these
       | older analogue artefacts, because this "prehistory" is larger
       | than our immediately accessible history.
       | 
       | I wonder how the desire to archive and preserve things like this
       | will persevere in the coming centuries. In 1000 years from now,
       | there will only be a recording "prehistory" of ~10% of the total
       | timeline. At some point historians will probably not even care
       | about the digital revolution, because anything that happened
       | prior to that becomes a vanishingly small part of our history.
       | Kind of the same way that we lump 1000s of years of early human
       | history into singular epochs, summarizing 100s of generations of
       | lived experiences into a single paragraph. With the digital
       | revolution, all that history will be stored in excruciating
       | detail, preserved arguably forever.
       | 
       | This probably applies to any stored information, not just
       | recorded audio. This is both fascinating and terrifying to me at
       | the same time!
        
         | jazzyjackson wrote:
         | Don't take for granted that just because its stored digitally
         | means its going to live forever. Data has to be copied to
         | survive, if no one cares to migrate data from one platform to
         | another, and that company goes under, probably the harddrives
         | will be wiped. My entire high school experience was documented
         | on myspace.com but when ownership transferred to News Corp and
         | they tried to pivot the site to some other business model they
         | accidentally deleted like half the user data iirc. So all those
         | photos are gone, small blessing.
        
           | ssl-3 wrote:
           | Indeed.
           | 
           | "The internet never forgets" was a fun notion to quip about
           | when the WWW was only a few years old, but that was a quarter
           | of a century ago.
           | 
           | The reality is that it forgets shit all the time.
        
       | pryelluw wrote:
       | I thought they sold reproductions of the wax records. They sell
       | thumb drives instead.
       | 
       | Wonder how much data can a wax record store. Anyone care to
       | calculate it?
        
         | pvg wrote:
         | The bandwidth (in the spectrum sense) is less than a phone
         | landline with more noise. So 'sub 1kbaud' (times total
         | recording length) is probably a reasonable initial guesstimate.
        
       | gopher2000 wrote:
       | It's been a hot minute since I saw the "real" logo and RAM files.
        
       | notresidenter wrote:
       | For anyone interested, the earliest sound recorded is from 1860,
       | and isn't from Edison, but from a Frenchman Edouard-Leon Scott de
       | Martinville, on a machine he called the "Phonoautograph". The
       | machine recorded "traces" which a team at Stanford managed to
       | convert back into sounds in 2008:
       | https://www.archeophone.com/artists/s/edouard-leon-scott-de-...
        
       | system2 wrote:
       | The site looks like built in 1800s too. :)
        
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       (page generated 2024-11-12 23:01 UTC)