[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