sample goldmine

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/01/28/archi...-home-reco.html

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Joshuah Bearman alerted me to David Dixon's amazing audio archive website, which has links to audio files that people recorded at home and unwittingly sent to Napster.

 

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This was right around the time that Napster was just beginning to penetrate into the average computer user's lives. At the same time, an audio utility program called MusicMatch Jukebox was also being widely used, since it was often pre-installed on off-the-shelf PC's. MMJ allowed you, among other things, to make recordings using the cheap microphone included with the PC, and save the file in mp3 format. If you didn't give the audio file a name, it assigned a default name "mic in track" followed by a number. Now if you were also running Napster, and you were careless enough to be sharing everything on your computer (which *many* were), then anyone also running Napster could just do a search for "mic in track" and find and download these personal recordings, usually without your knowledge.

 

I am that guy. I've amassed many, many hours of these recordings, which provide endless voyeuristic entertainment. Typical recordings were of people singing, rapping, or playing along with the radio (often badly), kids practicing their school book reports, audio love letters, kids being silly, and so forth. One of my finds was a 14-minute-long recording of a guy praying very fervently and emotionally, even lapsing into glossolalia. I've posted many of my favorites on my webpage, for free.

http://laweekly.blogs.com/joshuah_bearman/...-voyeurism.html

samples themselves at http://stark-effect.com/mit.html

i seem to remember snares talking about searching on slsk for DSC*****.jpg files in a similar manner, and of course there's sites like foundphotos, but i've never seen this principle applied to audio.

i haven't checked it out yet, but it's a cool idea nonetheless

FAO essines

lol

let's run every single one of them through microsoft songsmith.

now that's an idea i can run with

lol, i might actually download the demo now.

yeah i remember this from a few years back. I had loads of samples of people singing Will Smiths Wild Wild West, for some reason. I remember using WinMX to get the files.

i knew about this when you could actually do it, and at one point had a bunch of these files.. there might have even been a watmm thread about this.

*plays violin*

  nene multiple assgasms said:

let's run every single one of them through microsoft songsmith.

lol i want to hear this. would do so myself, but for the first time ever i'm upset i have a mac.

i listened to some of the songs on there, they're actually quite good, i downloaded them.

man that's awesome. hopefully i can find some long rant to put over an epic godspeed-style post-rock song, zole.