The Greatest Music Collection

[Cory K.]

D. Michael McIntyre wrote:
> On Sunday 23 March 2008, Cory K. wrote:
>   
>> My DREAM would be to buy it, sell the duplicates, digitize it ALL in a
>> massive archival server (FLAC of course. :P) and put whatever has fallen
>> into public domain out there for everyone.
>>     
>
> There's an interesting question in of itself.  I guess nothing after, what, 
> the '20s? the '30s? will ever be in public domain again as long as Walt 
> Disney is still in business, and still buying lobbyests.
>
>   
>> I'm really surprised someone hasn't bought this. Even some record label.
>> The historical value alone is nuts.
>>     
>
> I guess there are no rich guys who like old records.
>
> When you think about the logistics of it, it really would be a major 
> undertaking to transport it, warehouse it, and then convert it, and store the 
> results.  I don't know how many singles are in there vs. 78s vs 33s and 
> whatever, but just figuring an average of 30 minutes per record and 10% 
> redundancy in the collection, that's about 8.25 years of recording 24/7.
>   

Yeah. Looking over the site it talks about all of this. Crazy.

> CD quality recording is 10 MB per minute uncompressed, and let's assume you 
> compress on the fly and save 50%, which is really optimistic.  That means you 
> still need 21,600,000 MB of space to store it all.  Is that ~21 terabytes or 
> ~21 petabytes?  I think it's petabytes isn't it?
>
> Anyway, that's a lotta hard disks, and you would surely eat up more than a few 
> turntables recording all this too.  I could see your project getting into 
> $4,000,000 territory very easily.  Maybe $5,000,000.

Why you gotta go and pea on me? :P

> Plus the costs of 
> keeping all this data alive until you can eventually put it in solid state 
> DNA-based holocubes or something (when you will eventually be able to carry 
> this collection around hooked to a gizmo that pipes the audio directly into 
> the auditory receptors in your brain, for over eight years of continuous 
> tunes on the go.)
>   

Hehe. The site states:

"If you started listening to the music in this collection on the day you
were born, and listened every minute of every day, by the time you
finished, you'd be 57 years old."

> Where's Bill Gates when you need him?
>
> No, wait, the recordings would all have DRM, and would only be playable on Windows.
>   

No, it wouldn't. Just the Zune. :P

> Who's filthy rich in free software?  Certainly not me.
>
> It's huge and daunting as hell, but not implausible. Especially not the DNA 
> holocube part. Just you wait.
>   

I'll get the money from Stallman. Err... Shuttleworth. :P

-Cory \m/