Tinfoil.com – Dedicated to the preservation of early recorded sounds

79 pointsposted 6 days ago
by cenazoic
(tinfoil.com)

24 Comments

notpushkin

5 days ago

Some recordings on the website are RealMedia. I thought most players supported that but apparently quite a few don’t! So if nothing else works for you, try ffplay.

(Curiously enough, Celluloid seems to play this and Haruna doesn’t, although both are wrappers for mpv.)

romanhn

5 days ago

I love the fact that an early digital format for sound recordings is used here for early sound recordings. Fun fact - RealNetworks is still around.

tombert

5 days ago

I knew that, but it always baffles me when I hear it again. Who uses any Real products anymore?

Back in 2007 the only reason I ever used Real stuff was pirated episodes of South Park, and even then I think I was using Real Alternative. Even in 2007 the company seemed like it was dying, and I have no idea 17 years later it's still somehow alive.

nativeit

5 days ago

It appears they’re mostly buying other companies and their tech, with no apparent whales on either side of the ledger, so they don’t appear to be growing or failing at any great pace.

RandallBrown

5 days ago

I drive by their headquarters in Seattle pretty regularly and always wonder the same thing.

gwbas1c

5 days ago

Wait, people were still using Real back in 2007? At that point I had cycled through DivX, XviD, and then just started holding onto the .VOB file from the DVD.

tombert

5 days ago

As I said, the only thing I used it for was pirated episodes of South Park. For whatever reason, a lot of the South Park piracy websites were using .rm files.

For literally everything else, I think I used XviD until MakeMKV came along.

gwbas1c

4 days ago

Were they really, really bad quality? They might have been leftovers from the 1990s.

I used to download them over a modem.

tombert

4 days ago

They were pretty bad quality, not that it matters much for the early South Park.

Probably leftovers from the 90s, though at this point it’s really weird for me to watch the older South Park in high quality.

giancarlostoro

5 days ago

I remember installing their software reluctantly

walterbell

5 days ago

Realplayer supported SMIL!

Realtime dynamic composition of video streams from multiple servers with a few lines of XMl.

20 years later, there’s no alternative.

xrd

5 days ago

Jesus, how do you know that? Did you work there, like me?

Or, did you work for the evil empire (M$) and were you pimping HTML+Time?

walterbell

5 days ago

Just a random streaming user :) I could share one link that would seamlessly blend multiple short video clips from 3rd-party servers. Today that requires sharing multiple URLs that each load a heavy web page with separate HTML video player, with no playback continuity. Mini movie editing with a text editor and revision control!

autoexec

5 days ago

> Some recordings on the website are RealMedia. I thought most players supported that but apparently quite a few don’t!

VLC works, as usual.

RunningDroid

5 days ago

> (Curiously enough, Celluloid seems to play this and Haruna doesn’t, although both are wrappers for mpv.)

I'm not familiar with how they wrap MPV, but it could be that one uses MPV built against a library that provides support and the other uses an MPV that's not built against that library

ejstronge

5 days ago

From a different era, but still early in recorded history, you may enjoy the Excavated Shellac collection (https://excavatedshellac.com/) by Jonathan Ward.

Please share other collections if you know of any!

beAbU

5 days ago

Very cool.

We're coming up to 150 years of being able to record and preserve the sounds of the world around us.

The era of ubiquitous digital recording is probably only really 30-40 years old, so there is a real incentive to preserve these older analogue artefacts, because this "prehistory" is larger than our immediately accessible history.

I wonder how the desire to archive and preserve things like this will persevere in the coming centuries. In 1000 years from now, there will only be a recording "prehistory" of ~10% of the total timeline. At some point historians will probably not even care about the digital revolution, because anything that happened prior to that becomes a vanishingly small part of our history. Kind of the same way that we lump 1000s of years of early human history into singular epochs, summarizing 100s of generations of lived experiences into a single paragraph. With the digital revolution, all that history will be stored in excruciating detail, preserved arguably forever.

This probably applies to any stored information, not just recorded audio. This is both fascinating and terrifying to me at the same time!

jazzyjackson

5 days ago

Don't take for granted that just because its stored digitally means its going to live forever. Data has to be copied to survive, if no one cares to migrate data from one platform to another, and that company goes under, probably the harddrives will be wiped. My entire high school experience was documented on myspace.com but when ownership transferred to News Corp and they tried to pivot the site to some other business model they accidentally deleted like half the user data iirc. So all those photos are gone, small blessing.

ssl-3

5 days ago

Indeed.

"The internet never forgets" was a fun notion to quip about when the WWW was only a few years old, but that was a quarter of a century ago.

The reality is that it forgets shit all the time.

pryelluw

5 days ago

I thought they sold reproductions of the wax records. They sell thumb drives instead.

Wonder how much data can a wax record store. Anyone care to calculate it?

pvg

5 days ago

The bandwidth (in the spectrum sense) is less than a phone landline with more noise. So ‘sub 1kbaud’ (times total recording length) is probably a reasonable initial guesstimate.

gopher2000

5 days ago

It's been a hot minute since I saw the "real" logo and RAM files.

system2

5 days ago

The site looks like built in 1800s too. :)