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
MidnightRider39 19 hours ago [-]
It’s one of the few (the only?) org that I donate to without second thoughts
piker 1 days ago [-]
Before then heroine and fame took over Kurt
pimlottc 1 days ago [-]
You (probably) mean “heroin”
jgrowl 1 days ago [-]
A barbarous Floydian slip.
costcopizza 1 days ago [-]
Definitely heroine.
piker 1 days ago [-]
lol! 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.
ufocia 1 days ago [-]
He probably meant Courtney Love
mannyv 1 days ago [-]
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.
derwiki 1 days ago [-]
Interesting! Cleaning up digitized recordings or starting from the tape source?
rectang 1 days ago [-]
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.
ssl-3 1 days ago [-]
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.
(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.)
terribleperson 14 hours ago [-]
I'm glad you called out the Dragon. Besides being an impressive piece of engineering, it's a beautiful piece of art. One of the most striking pieces of consumer electronics I've ever seen.
CamperBob2 23 hours ago [-]
I don't miss cassettes one bit, but I really miss marketing literature that reads like that. A masterpiece in itself.
hackingonempty 1 days ago [-]
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.
1 days ago [-]
bookofjoe 1 days 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.
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.
adfm 23 hours ago [-]
Wu-tang + run the jewels sounds like a hell of a show.
scrame 19 hours ago [-]
The final chamber.
dec0dedab0de 1 days ago [-]
they may count the opening acts as separate concerts
bookofjoe 1 days ago [-]
This is disposative.
bookofjoe 23 hours ago [-]
Look it up
scw 22 hours ago [-]
They're unlikely to find much unless they instead try “dispositive”.
bookofjoe 7 hours ago [-]
Yikes! Corrected. Thank you.
jamiek88 20 hours ago [-]
Spell 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.
bookofjoe 6 hours ago [-]
1. noted (see above)
2. "likely"? Rather, certain.
3. "Turn down the arrogance no one gives a shit what you used to be able to do." I will take this to heart and try to do better. I do appreciate your taking the time to address my issue.
MidnightRider39 19 hours ago [-]
If you check the collection most nights had ~3 bands playing
textfiles 1 days ago [-]
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.
cwillu 1 days ago [-]
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!
da02 1 days ago [-]
Did he come from an old-money wealthy family? How did he find the time and money to be an unofficial cultural archivist?
textfiles 1 days ago [-]
He just really, really, really committed himself.
Underphil 23 hours 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."
Yeah I love these sites. Wish the data would all be opened up for the nerds!
throwaway2046 1 days ago [-]
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.
Myzel394 1 days ago [-]
Glad they're uploading it publicly and not to some private torrent trackers like Concertos
lostlogin 23 hours ago [-]
As 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”
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.
> 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.
justinclift 1 days ago [-]
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
ninjin 1 days ago [-]
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.
Another great live act and recording. I am sure Mojo would very much approve of this being shared as well.
tmtvl 22 hours ago [-]
I mean, I thought They Might Be Giants were kinda well known?
I have heard of Godspeed You! Black Emperor and My Bloody Valentine (although I may be thinking of Bullet For My Valentine), though I don't own any of their albums and I can't recall where I know them from. I think both of them were mentioned in some absolute Z-tier fanfic I read once.
justinclift 17 hours ago [-]
> I thought They Might Be Giants were kinda well known?
> “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 1 days ago [-]
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.
exossho 1 days ago [-]
this reminds me of the old internet
menno-dot-ai 1 days ago [-]
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.
farfatched 1 days ago [-]
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.
1 days ago [-]
slim 1 days ago [-]
or maybe AI behemoths are driving demand
steveBK123 1 days ago [-]
Yes, in the old low bandwidth days i participated in some live concert snail-mail CD swap online mailing lists / forums
pwr1 1 days ago [-]
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.
TrailingArbutus 1 days ago [-]
2001 era internet vibes, what is this doing here in 2026 haha??
DM70 1 days ago [-]
It 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.
".. 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 20 hours ago [-]
This. 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).
bsenftner 1 days ago [-]
I remember when a collection like this had to be kept secret, otherwise the recording labels would sue. Nobody cares anymore?
dzdt 1 days ago [-]
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.
pimlottc 1 days ago [-]
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.
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.)
-----
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.
forgotmypw17 21 hours ago [-]
Does anyone know how to find the hiphop/rap shows?
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.
soumyaskartha 1 days ago [-]
The stuff that never got officially released is always the most interesting. Live recordings capture something the studio versions were never trying to.
sassymuffinz 1 days ago [-]
So if my maths is right, 10K concerts over ~ 40 years - this guy was at a concert 5 nights a week every week?
scrame 1 days ago [-]
Concerts usually have more than one act.
1 days ago [-]
jgtrosh 1 days ago [-]
Sounds like they might have been working the gigs? Maybe a sounds engineer
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
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
2. "likely"? Rather, certain.
3. "Turn down the arrogance no one gives a shit what you used to be able to do." I will take this to heart and try to do better. I do appreciate your taking the time to address my issue.
Carry on.
Remember to donate and help keep the Internet Archive alive.
“...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”
* 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. :)
---
* 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. :)
---
* 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...
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-...
> 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.
"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
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.
I have heard of Godspeed You! Black Emperor and My Bloody Valentine (although I may be thinking of Bullet For My Valentine), though I don't own any of their albums and I can't recall where I know them from. I think both of them were mentioned in some absolute Z-tier fanfic I read once.
Thanks, I completely missed that.
It's too late for me to edit my above post, so for anyone else who wants to take a look: https://archive.org/details/aadamjacobs?and[]=creator%3A%22t...
> “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.
It's one person's curated collection.
It's it being made available for the sake of it.
It's novel, unexpected. a gift.
".. 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.
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.
0: https://chicagoreader.com/music/tapehead/
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.