This field recording repository is an extension of the eGroup disscussion list Phonography. Although this is primarily for the Phonography readers, others are welcome and encouraged to upload their recordings.

Share your field recordings through the web form. Any file format is accepted, though MP3 is preffered.

It all starts with the disc recorder or "lathe" as it is often referred to, an amazing piece of equipment designed with a slowly rotating feed screw mechanism and carriage to move a cutting head across the radius of the disc. The accurately shaped cutting stylus, mounted in the head, cuts a precise spiral groove across a flat lacquer coated aluminum disc (acetate) spinning at an exact speed of 33-1/3, 45, or in the old days, 78.26 revolutions per minute, the standard phonograph operating speeds. Read more

The John and Ruby Lomax 1939 Southern States Recording Trip is a multi-format ethnographic field collection which includes nearly 700 sound recordings (102 of which are performed in Spanish), fieldnotes, dust jackets, and other manuscripts documenting a three-month, 6,502 mile trip through the Southern United States collecting folksongs.

If you compose a piece of music you immediately own the rights associated with that composition. The composition is intellectual property and as soon as you as a composer conceive it, it belongs to you. When the composition begins to be performed and recorded onto physical mediums, it is necessary to register the work with the correct music rights organisations so that they can help you protect and administer those rights and collect royalty money associated with your compositions. Read more

Author: The MIO Team

Turtle manages and operates the recording studio.
Jim places the records in the jukebox. It contains sounds that Jim enjoys and Marianne tolerates.
Pudgy just smiles.

All original recordings are understood to be in the public domain.

Monkey’s Audio is a fast and easy way to compress digital music.  Unlike traditional methods such as mp3, ogg, or lqt that permanently discard quality to save space, Monkey’s Audio only makes perfect, bit-for-bit copies of your music.  That means it always sounds perfect – exactly the same as the original.  Even though the sound is perfect, it still saves a lot of space. (think of it as a beefed-up Winzip™ for your music) The other great thing is that you can always decompress your Monkey’s Audio files back to the exact, original files.  That way, you’ll never have to recopy your CD collection to switch formats, and you’ll always be able to recreate the original music CD if something ever happens to yours.

The Christian Sex Instruction Album is a rare and antiquated sub genre. An exhaustive search turned up only three records (well, two and a half really), the most recent of which was released in 1971. Lately Christians have opted for the "less is more" strategy of sex education. That is simply telling their youth that abstinence before marriage is the way to go and don’t bother us with details. The umbrella title for this philosophy is called "True Love Waits." The "movement" consists of a pop tune ("True Love Waits") extolling the virtues of self-denial, a wallet-sized pledge card (lamination recommended) and a sports hero celebrity spokesman (The Dallas Mavericks’ A.C. Green). Abstinence is good. What’s to argue? Having listened to the following albums in one sitting, this shift in policy is quite understandable and perhaps even laudable. Read more

On these pages are the sounds of North American birds - not just bird calls or bird songs, but all the sounds birds make, such as wing sounds and bill rattles. Since most bird species use different vocalizations for different circumstances.
Individuals of a species sing different songs with different "words" and "phrases" than another individual, and the same species from different territories sing about different things in different ways.

Do you own mp3 files ? How about ogg, mpc, ape, flac, aac, apl, wv, mp4, ofr, or spx files ? Do you have a lot of them ?
If yes, then you probably already know that it is easier to create a chaotic budge of files with strange names and in wrong locations than to have a clean and nice collection where every file is where it is supposed to be, with a perfect name and Tag information.
Sounds like the truth… don’t worry The GodFather is here to put order to chaos and put you in control.No more strange file names and endless search for "that song"!.Rename,update Tags,restructure files on hard disk, create/merge play lists,encode-decode with LAME/Ogg Vorbis/MpcEnc, export/import to/from file, play, use freedb.org & allmusic.com, catalog them in a library… with ease of use and perfect results every time.

Finally it is about time to rest assure that you will find the files you want to listen to instantly.Stop struggling, sit back, and enjoy your favorite music.

Ken Rockwell’s wife got herself an iPod music player. He was volunteered to fill it with her music from her CDs.

He was trying to learn what settings gave his wife the most music on her Nano while retaining the best quality for my own critical listening, with a single import of each CD. Read more …

Sounddesigner Ben Burtt’s responsibility on Star Wars was to create specifically unusual sounds - weapons, vehicles, character and key backgrounds.

 Ben Burtt was a film sound buff as a child (he recorded and replayed the sound tracks of his favorite movies) Burtt enrolled at the university of Southern California’s film school with the intention of becoming a director. He received a student job cataloguing the Columbia sound library, which had been donated to the University. A call by Star Wars producer Gary Kurtz to U.S.C. led to a successful interview for Burtt. He was given carte blanche to work out of his apartment near the U.S.C. campus in order to collect at a leisure pace those sounds that might be useful. 

 He spent a year recording anything that could be turned upside down and backwards to make Lucas world come alive.  

Build your own high quality, easy to use record cleaner. This design can be built for less than $50 and will remove at least as much grunge as the expensive VPI record cleaners. The original concept was developed by Jay Amble.

Another great class ( from Tweak ) : 16 bit and 24 bit audio, Discussion of the mysteries behind bit-depth, sample rates and sound quality

This article is going to be kept as simple as possible.  It’s just designed to get the new person up to speed on the issues and provide a strong sense of perspective on what really matters.  We are going to talk about bit depth and sample rates, how these translate into storage requirements, and then talk about the subjective differences between the two methods of recording your music.  In short, what is the relation of 24 bit recordings to the "sound quality" we all want.

Woke up, fell out of bed… rampaged by a slashdot horde.

Some clarifications to the slashdot crowd:

The whole thing was done in a couple of late nights so I didn’t really have much time to gather all the technical details concerning phonograph modulations. Moreover the "archeological" reverse-engineering aspect was part of the fun. I now know (thanks to some great replies) that the horizontal modulation (the only one I did decode) is the sum of the left/right audio channels (which are each encoded on the sides of a V-shaped groove).

Some repliers seemed to be a tad confused as to what recordings were the actual decodings. I’d like to stress that gramophone3.mp3 is a recording while the rest (dneedle*) were decoded from the image.

Have fun.