I collect records. I rarely buy anything blindly by name or label; I like to discover new stuff by listening to it first. I usually do this by spending hours in grimy bins with a record player but I also found that sometimes Ebay sellers post sound clips of their records. Specifically, what I noticed is that sellers are more inclined to make the effort of posting a sound clip if the record is rare -- i.e. you can't find a clip elsewhere -- and the record sounds really interesting. It helps them make a sale.<p>So I made an Ebay API spider that gets all the sound clips and record release data. It's been running like a dream since 2007 and I currently have 89,830 sound clips of rare records (probably some dupes in there). I used to watch the feed all the time but I kept finding really cool records and was spending a lot of money! I got busy. I had a good test suite so anytime there was a Unicode error or some bug I patched it pretty quick.<p>I steadily accumulated a pretty amazing collection of sound clips seeded by these search terms: soul, funk, reggae, ska, country, breaks, disco, psych, afrobeat, jazz, rocksteady, garage, indie, library (as in library music), new wave, electronic, brazilian, and boogie.<p>I made a frontend for listening to clips all Ajaxy-like and got it working on mobile phones and major browsers. I was sort of happy with it but ran into some database bottlenecks and got busy again so I never launched it. It was too slow to be usable.<p>What should I do? I don't really have time or money to finish it out but I'd like people to use it to discover music. Since the clips are short and will link to music for purchase, either MP3 (if it exists) or original vinyl on Ebay/Discogs, there shouldn't be any copyright problems. It's fair use to promote music for sale with a clip.<p>You can comment here or reach me by email: kumar.mcmillan@gmail.com
Get in touch with the Internet Archive, perhaps?<p><a href="http://archive.org/about/contact.php" rel="nofollow">http://archive.org/about/contact.php</a>
Dammit. After posting, I caught up with the feed of clips and just bought six records :( It turns up records like this: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCC0wgVXNpc" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCC0wgVXNpc</a> Wat??
The Internet Archive can provide a home for the files-- custom UI's would come from others and could be fun. info@archive.org<p>-brewster
Digital Librarian
You should team up with <a href="http://echonest.com/" rel="nofollow">http://echonest.com/</a> they have the team and the experience and could probably help you do something cool with it.<p>Given the seed terms; I'm imagining an infinite dub mix, where you pick and mutate beats and fade clips into each other. Too bad our legal system makes such a thing impossible.
Unrelated but since you're into rare/old/obscure recordings, you might appreciate the Cylinder Recording collection at UCSB.<p><a href="http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/" rel="nofollow">http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/</a>
Have you checked to see if they're on <a href="http://what.cd" rel="nofollow">http://what.cd</a> already? It's the de-facto bittorrent tracker for music. It is possible that many of those clips you have are already on there.<p>And if not, you could seed them yourself :D
Give the files to the Internet Archive (www.archive.org), definitely! They'll host it all for free, and make a collection out of it. E-mail them directly or contact Jason Scott (@textfiles on Twitter) who manages a preservation group for them called Archive Team.
Sound clips are priceless for music producers if they are in a good format (320 kbps mp3 or lossless). Well, if they have no license which prohibits their usage. But music producers are not really "careful" about this, haha.
Why not open source and share with the world. You can wack an amount of advertising on the site and make some nice income. Obviously just be careful of copyright.
I'm sending you an email. I know someone at IMMuB (Brazilian Musical Memory Institute) [1] that will be interested in the Brazilian clips you have.<p>Thanks for posting!<p>[1] <a href="http://www.memoriamusical.com.br/" rel="nofollow">http://www.memoriamusical.com.br/</a> (in Portuguese)
I run BitShuva.com and we build custom internet radio stations (think Pandora clones). If copyright isn't an issue, I'd gladly put a custom radio station up for you. Shoot me an email, contact@bitshuva.com