Perhaps the fact that it is unassuming

[aminaas1576]

It would be a great story to have the first item as part of the collection to be some rare Grateful Dead recording from 1968, but it is actually an unassuming Rusted Root audience recording from August 24, 2001 uploaded to the new Live Music Archive collection by Aizen on August 12, 2002. You can listen to it here. Of course, there has to be a Grateful Dead connection as the show features a guest appearance by Mark Karan, guitarist (at the time) for Ratdog, one of Bob Weir’s side projects. is more in line with the goal of preservation and archiving. Preservation of all, not just the shiny fancy gem. Permission from the Grateful Dead came a little while later, through Brewster’s connection to John Perry Barlow, who worked together on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

As the Live Music Archive was established, the etree community jumped in to help get things rolling – dedicating hundreds of hours to cataloging, uploading, and verifying recordings of shows. In those days it phone number library would take 6-12 hours to upload a show via FTP. Jon Aizen describes grabbing shows off etree’s FTP server network as well as from hard drives and other sources and uploading them to the Live Music Archive. Aizen also worked in the early days to create the curation process to enable volunteers to ensure that uploads were permitted by the artists.

The Internet Archive team also worked on the “deriver” software which would convert the lossless recordings to MP3 and other more accessible formats (which came after heated debate amongst the etree community, for many of whom the notion of lossy distribution of recordings was anathema). Today’s uploading experience is a web interface that takes most folks 10-20 minutes to upload a show and have it almost immediately available to the world. There were many people involved in the early days and I’m sure we will miss some, but we’d like to thank the following notable contributors.