National Jukebox at the Library of Congress

About the National Jukebox



Pictured here is an acoustic recording session conducted
 in the era before microphones were utilized for recording.
Music and speech were funneled through recording horns,
which in turn vibrated an attached diaphragm and stylus,
thus etching the sound waves onto a rotating wax disc.

 The Library of Congress presents the National Jukebox, which makes historical sound recordings available to the public free of charge. The Jukebox includes recordings from the extraordinary collections of the Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation and other contributing libraries and archives. Recordings in the Jukebox were issued on record labels now owned by Sony Music Entertainment, which has granted the Library of Congress a gratis license to stream acoustical recordings.
At launch, the Jukebox includes more than 10,000 recordings made by the Victor Talking Machine Company between 1901 and 1925. Jukebox content will be increased regularly, with additional Victor recordings and acoustically recorded titles made by other Sony-owned U.S. labels, including Columbia, OKeh, and others.

Recordings are streamed through an embedded player on the Web site. In addition to being searchable, recordings are browsable by composer, performer, category, genre, and target audience, among other options. The database also includes playlists, or collections of recordings, that have been assembled by the developers. Among the playlists are Early Tin Pan Alley, and Songs by Irving Berlin. The Library of Congress has made a wise decision to comprehensively digitize all recordings from each label, preserving music that otherwise might have been lost to posterity.

It took a lot of work to go from a 78 rpm disc to a digital recording that can be played online. Find out what was involved in creating the National Jukebox
Reviewed in Choice, Oct 2011. http://www.loc.gov/jukebox/