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A Collection Of Thousands Of Hip Hop Mixtapes

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Chance The Rapper

Jason Scott has uploaded thousands and thousands of hip-hop mixtapes to the Internet Archive (almost 6,000 to date). He says he has access to over 17,000 tapes and somewhere close to that number might end up on the Archive over the next few months. There is obviously a ton of hip-hop culture to dig through here. Jason notes:

There’s a lot coded into the covers of these mixtapes (not to even mention the stuff coded into the lyrics themselves) – there’s stressing of riches, drug use, sexual drive, and oppression. I’m personally fascinated at the amount of reference to codeine and the purple color of “Purple Drank”, which, if you’ve missed that subject matter up to now… good for you.

If you’re new to the world of hip-hop mixtapes (as I am) the links below should get your discovery started

This is a great time to point out that the Internet Archive is an invaluable resource. In these times of link rot and the haphazard closing of essential web services (we miss you Google Reader) the Internet Archive is, well, archiving the web. The Wayback Machine now indexes over 435 billion webpages going back nearly 20 years.

The end goal here, like all the things I do in this realm, is simple: Providing free access to huge amounts of culture, so people can reference, contextualize, enjoy and delight over material in an easy-to-reach, linkable, usable manner. Apparently it’s already taken off, but here you go too.

2016 SXSW Free Music Torrents & Radio

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In what has become a sort of tradition around here, I am once again posting a link to the torrents that have all the MP3 files publicly posted on the SXSW Website that will be at the music showcase this year. This year’s torrents include 1,593 files totaling 10.33GB, making it the largest to-date.

SXSW 2016 Showcasing Artists Part 1, 1,006 files, 6.50GB
SXSW 2016 Showcasing Artists Part 2, 587 files, 3.82GB

Links to torrents for earlier years can be found on The (Unofficial) Home of SXSW Torrents website.

If you don’t want to have all these songs on your hard drive but want to have a listen, use this SXSW radio to give a random selection a listen.

New York Public Library Has Over 670,000 Digitized Items And Some Very Cool Tools To Access Them

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Acrobats far from their mountain home -- grizzly bears in a street at Jacksonville, Florida. [1905] 1870?-1906?Acrobats far from their mountain home — grizzly bears in a street at Jacksonville, Florida. [1905] 1870?-1906? via NYPL stereograph collection

Earlier this week the New York Public Library enhanced access to over 670,000 digitized files in its massive database of digital collections. This includes access to free books, paintings, newspaper clippings, digitized streaming video, prints, botanical illustrations, photographs, maps, manuscripts, sheet music, menus, hundreds of thousands of public domain images, and more. Some of the documents date back as far as the 11th century

Best of all, NYPL has created some really cool tools to search, access and utilize the collection.

All of the Public Domain items are “No permission required. No restrictions on use.” They digitized these items specifically so that people will reuse and remix for your personal projects. So much so that NYPL announced the NYPL Labs PAID Remix Residency for artists, information designers, and software developers that is designed to spur transformative and interesting new uses for their digital collections. If that isn’t enough NYPL is adding high-quality machine-readable metadata to the hundreds of thousands of assets and providing an API!

Well done, NYPL. Go forth and reuse!

via Coudal

2015 SXSW Music Torrent

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After a rough patch last year, SXSWTorrent.com is back in full force. This years SXSW music torrent contains 844 files totaling 5.41GB with more to be released later this month.

SXSWTorrent.com has music showcase torrents going all the way back to 2005 – 11 years worth of torrents with over 11,000 songs.

If you’re not interested in downloading/seeding but still want to listen to the music you might want to try this SXSW music page. Also, somebody has been trying to create a Spotify playlist of this years showcase artists as well.

2014 SXSW Music Torrent

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So the SXSW Music Torrent is on some shaky ground this year. According to the SXSWTorrent.com (where I have gotten most of my previous links to SXSW Torrents):

Starting this year SXSW is replacing the sample tracks they have provided for years with links to Soundcloud pages. While there are certainly known ways to download those samples, Soundcloud goes through considerable trouble to prevent that from happening. Since these torrents have always been about providing easier access to otherwise readily downloadable samples instead of outright piracy, this regrettably means that, if SXSW sticks with this new design, we will be unable to provide torrents in the future.

So this year, SXSWTorrent.com has a single torrent with 783 tracks and there will likely not be a second installment this year.

There has been an effort to get a playlist together over on Spotify. So far there are 1800 tracks on that list.

Additionally, Pirate Bay has links to a torrent that claims:

Unofficial SXSW 2014 Music Showcase – over 1200 songs from 1200 different bands from the upcoming Annual music, film, and interactive conference and festival held in Austin, TX. More complete than www.sxswtorrent.com – contains rips from youtube, soundcloud, and the SXSW site itself.

There is lot of overlap between all these sources, however, each source also contains songs the others don’t. Hopefully next year we’ll have a single, comprehensive list once again.

UPDATE: The Pirate Bay torrent has a bunch of missing file information so @pronoiac gathered it all up and put it in a spreadsheet. Additionally NPR has put out a list of 100 downloadable songs from bands at this year’s SXSW.

2013 SXSW Music Torrent & Radio

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I’m a little late to the party this year but the 2013 SXSW Music Showcase Torrent is up for your downloading pleasure. I try to post a link to the torrent every year but Greg Hewgill’s website has torrents for SXSW years going all the way back to 2005. This year the torrent contains 999 files totaling 6.13 GB of music from bands playing at this years South By Southwest Music & Media Conference. Keep a close eye on Greg’s website because he will most likely be putting up a second torrent with more bands in early March.

If you’re not interested in downloading/seeding but still want to listen to the music you might want to try this (currently not working) SXSW FM page.

2012 SXSW Music Torrent & Radio

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As per tradition, Here is a link to the 2011 SXSW Music Showcase Torrent. This year the torrent contains 771 files totaling 4.41 GB of music from bands playing at this years South By Southwest Music & Media Conference. Keep a close eye on Greg Hewgill’s website because he will most likely be putting up a second torrent with more bands in early March.

I have yet to find a service that is streaming this year’s files.

UPDATE: The second torrent has been released. It has an additional 448 files (2.8 GB)

[via jwz]

Disneyland Entry Whistle/Sound Ringtones

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There have been a few people coming to Artifacting.com looking for the ringtones of the little whistling sound that is made when you go through the turnstile at Disneyland so I thought I would post free downloads of it for anyone that wanted them as ringtones for their phone or alerts for their computer. I have also posted the sound that you here when they scan your ticket while entering Disneyland. Enjoy.

Disney Entry Whistle
Disney Entry Sound

This Ain’t No Cowtown Volume 1

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“This Ain’t No Cowtown” (A Colorado Comp) is a celebration of Colorado artists in compilation form. Consisting twenty-two Colorado based bands, “This Ain’t No Cowtown” is being offered on a pay-what-you-want basis with all proceeds going directly back to the artists. Thanks to ZetaKaye House for putting this comp together.

Bands included on the comp:

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