[Exmoor]

I've thought about this quite a bit. I'm a big fan of the record label Bear Family, a German label that specializes in releasing boxsets from R&B/Rock&Roll/Country artists from the 20's-70's. Want to hear every song The Carter Family ever recorded in their original incarnation? They have a 12 CD boxset for you! They generally do this be acquiring the original master tapes from the labels, which often include a lot of previously unreleased songs or alternate takes, and remastering them.

Hip-Hop probably has a higher percentage of this material than almost any other genre, especially once you get to the mixtape/blog era. Unfortunately, most of this material was only released in unofficial forms, often on low-quality MP3s and often with some random dude shouting over the intro. A lot of these tracks were also recorded over unlicensed beats/samples, so even if clean recordings were available official release would be impossible.

[michaelt]

> Unfortunately, most of this material was only released in unofficial forms, often on low-quality MP3s and often with some random dude shouting over the intro.

If that's the art form as it was experienced, do archivists need to make a "better" version?

[tyre]

This is like asking if a recording of the 1996 Olympics should have to include all of the commercials.

For historical purposes, sure, have that as an option, but lil wayne's mixtapes are not better off for the random DJs or website advertisements yelled over them. That's not the music he made.

[w-ll]

Lil Wayne does have producer tags on his offical mixtaps, its just a lot of sites add their own crap even on top of that.

[Exmoor]

I get your point, but I absolutely do prefer to hear older recordings where they have been able to in some way improve the quality over what was initially released. An extreme case would be some of the old 78rpm records that recent innovations have been able to clean up substantially. While the hip-hop records I'm talking about are not nearly that bad, the releases were often made in 128kbps with whatever encoder was available. Some may even have been transcoded.

[wahnfrieden]

It is those very versions which need preserving if that is what exists

[whinenot]

> A lot of these tracks were also recorded over unlicensed beats/samples

That's the killer, right there. For example, the Beastie Boys album Paul's Boutique probably could not be released today as it samples an incredible number of other artists.[0]

[0]https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7kI8XoDoiHcrG0aGmtvq1g

[S_A_P]

A lot of hip hop still has unlicensed samples in it but the slices just keep getting smaller and less recognizable. And believe it or not a lot of the samples in Paul’s Boutique were licensed. I do agree with you though that (maybe until recently as I think the price of sampling is softening somewhat with sites like tracklib) Paul’s Boutique would be expensive to release today. Then there are stories like the Mark Ronson song ooh wee that he owns -25% of[0] because the boney m string riff took 100% of the publishing and Dennis Coffey drums took another 25%. So he theoretically lost money each play. Public enemy’s it takes a nation of millions to hold us back is another album that would lose money to make today.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ooh_Wee_(song)

[PerryDigital]

Just to note for the two posters above, and anyone else, Paul's Boutique is now on Spotify :)

(So is three feet high and rising by De La Soul)

[zhengyi13]

On a similar note, Danger Mouse's "The Grey Album" remixing Jay Z's The Black Album over samples from The Beatles' White Album... Amazing.

It's pretty findable, but it's unfortunate that there's no canonical source.

[waldothedog]

Somewhere I have a dead iPod shuffle with the grey album on it. Listened to that non stop in undergrad. Have not been able to find another bootleg of it :(

[zhengyi13]

I know I'm late here, but YouTube has 'em; you can ask for it by name.

[lawgimenez]

I have an old mp3 Wu-Tang vs The Beatles, I think it is not available on streaming. Not sure if the same artist who remixed it but it was fire.

[dendrite9]

The original shows is available on mixcloud for anyone who wants to hear any of the interesting commentary that went with the playlist. It looks like the It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back Breakdown is up too, but I can't see the De La Soul one.

https://www.kexp.org/breakdown/paulsboutique/ https://www.kexp.org/breakdown/publicenemy30/

[WesternMAGeek]

Bear Family is amazing!

I have a bunch of their box sets. Pure archival gold - including Jerry Lee Lewis making really crude jokes in between takes of a song.

We need a Bear Family equivalent for hip-hop!

[lostlogin]

> Unfortunately, most of this material was only released in unofficial forms, often on low-quality MP3s

I know nothing about audio - is it possible to upscale the quality somehow? Improve the quality via some process?

[giantrobot]

Audio compression literally throws out data. It's audio the human ear isn't likely/able to hear but it's still gone. Different codecs and even different implementations of codecs throw out different audio data.

Any sort of upscaling is going to involve a lot of guesses about what was thrown out. For every codec and implementation there will be a lot of possibilities of what the original data might have looked like. At the end of the process you likely aren't going to get a result that necessarily sounds better than the low quality encoding. There will likely be a lot of artifacts introduced by the upscaling.

It's not impossible but something you'd need a specially trained AI to do I would think.

[lostlogin]

I work with a system which extrapolates data in the frequency domain to reduce noise in medical images and then doubles the images resolution in the x and y direction (so 4x the pixels). It’s absolutely amazing.

It’ll be interesting to see if audio ever gets a similar treatment and in what areas it can be applied.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

Noise levels in contemporary audio is vanishingly small, and has not really been the target of any audio technology for quite a long time.

Of course, restoration of older recordings is a separate issue, and that technology is 20-30 years old, at least (and very, very good).

[jl6]

Technically no, pragmatically maybe…

If the information has been lost through using a lossy codec like MP3, there’s no getting it back.

But there are “AI upscaling” techniques that use models to fill in the missing pieces. It isn’t really restoring the original, more like painting over a crack in a style that is typically used by similar artists in similar contexts. Such models could produce a result conceptually similar to what a cover band might produce.