# MP3.com Dump Released on Internet Archive
**URL:** https://community.metabrainz.org/t/mp3-com-dump-released-on-internet-archive/598064
**Category:** General chatter
**Tags:** release, digital-media
**Created:** [August 21, 2022, 8:01pm UTC](https://community.metabrainz.org/t/mp3-com-dump-released-on-internet-archive/598064 "2022-08-21T20:01:54Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@sound.and.vision](https://community.metabrainz.org/u/sound.and.vision)
#### Post date: [August 21, 2022, 8:01pm UTC](https://community.metabrainz.org/t/mp3-com-dump-released-on-internet-archive/598064/1 "2022-08-21T20:01:55Z")
For any digital archaeologists out there, this might be interesting.
[https://archive.org/details/mp3-com-rescue-barge](https://archive.org/details/mp3-com-rescue-barge)
The Internet Archive, namely Jason Scott, has been given a “dump” of [MP3.com](http://MP3.com)’s digital audio files before their CNET take-over in late 2004. This “dump” contains a large amount of early MP3 files from various independent musicians.
The dump has been “de-duplicated” and roughly sorted by filename into various chunks.
I am of course downloading a chunk to see what results turn up in Picard! 😃
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### Author:  [@InvisibleMan78](https://community.metabrainz.org/u/InvisibleMan78)
#### Post date: [August 21, 2022, 9:22pm UTC](https://community.metabrainz.org/t/mp3-com-dump-released-on-internet-archive/598064/2 "2022-08-21T21:22:14Z")
Nice finding, thanks for letting us know.
Did you read the note:
> … As a result, descriptions and information are scant about the tracks and artist information was not wrapped into the MP3s themselves. While they are all playable, very little else is known about them. They have been put into a set of relatively large multi-track sets, but none of the tracks are necessarily related to each other.
Please let us also know how AcoustID and/or Picard recognize this tracks.
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### Author:  [@sound.and.vision](https://community.metabrainz.org/u/sound.and.vision)
#### Post date: [August 21, 2022, 9:27pm UTC](https://community.metabrainz.org/t/mp3-com-dump-released-on-internet-archive/598064/3 "2022-08-21T21:27:42Z")
Well so far in the Internet Archive Discord, Jason’s done a few packs and we’re getting less than maybe 1% detection rate… these tracks are _ **SUPER RARE** _ - so looks like I’ve got some more research and adding to the database ahead of me 😰
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### Author:  [@InvisibleMan78](https://community.metabrainz.org/u/InvisibleMan78)
#### Post date: [August 22, 2022, 6:16am UTC](https://community.metabrainz.org/t/mp3-com-dump-released-on-internet-archive/598064/4 "2022-08-22T06:16:22Z")
I have downloaded the part “A-2” (18 GB) with 4’996 songs.
These mp3 only have a quality of 128 kbit/s CBR and only contains an ID3v1 tag.
Embedded are the Artist name and Title and in the comment an URL to the old [mp3.com](http://mp3.com) website.
There is no information about Album, release Year, Genre and no Cover is embedded.
The only thing I currently see, is to search for additional information in the wayback machine:
> **[MP3.com: THE destination for digital music.](https://web.archive.org/web/20021130104615/https://www.mp3.com/)**
>
> MP3.com is THE destination for music online, featuring streaming and downloadable music from more than 200,000 artists.
Unfortunately, the embedded URL’s I tried (like [http://www.mp3.com/ATProom](http://www.mp3.com/ATProom)) are no more available in the wayback machine…
Any other ideas?
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### Author:  [@slipmaxim](https://community.metabrainz.org/u/slipmaxim)
#### Post date: [August 22, 2022, 3:34pm UTC](https://community.metabrainz.org/t/mp3-com-dump-released-on-internet-archive/598064/5 "2022-08-22T15:34:19Z")
I’m very tempted to download a pack and see what those mp3s are 😁
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### Author:  [@sound.and.vision](https://community.metabrainz.org/u/sound.and.vision)
#### Post date: [August 22, 2022, 4:29pm UTC](https://community.metabrainz.org/t/mp3-com-dump-released-on-internet-archive/598064/6 "2022-08-22T16:29:27Z")
Go for it! I’m diverting at the moment and filling in the database with [MP3.com](http://MP3.com) bands / artists that aren’t already here, in the hopes that we can match some of these thousands of digital tracks to some one.
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### Author:  [@sound.and.vision](https://community.metabrainz.org/u/sound.and.vision)
#### Post date: [August 22, 2022, 4:30pm UTC](https://community.metabrainz.org/t/mp3-com-dump-released-on-internet-archive/598064/7 "2022-08-22T16:30:18Z")
> [@InvisibleMan78](#):
>
> Any other ideas?
Ultimately no; it’s a case of going extremely hard with searches, using other databases like Discogs, last.fm, AllMusic etc. to see if they have any records. It’s all fun, but extremely time consuming.
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### Author:  [@sound.and.vision](https://community.metabrainz.org/u/sound.and.vision)
#### Post date: [August 22, 2022, 10:31pm UTC](https://community.metabrainz.org/t/mp3-com-dump-released-on-internet-archive/598064/8 "2022-08-22T22:31:51Z")
Jason has just located this:
> **[Archive Team: The MP3.COM Skeleton Collection : Free Download, Borrow, and...](https://archive.org/details/mp3com-skeleton)**
>
> This 10 gigabyte .ZIP file is a raw collection of the contents of an MP3.COM crawl conducted before the final MP3.COM shutdown in December of 2003. It does NOT...
This contains a large amount of metadata that is likely missing from WayBackMachine; but keep in mind its 10GB of HTML files
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### Author:  [@btoplak](https://community.metabrainz.org/u/btoplak)
#### Post date: [August 23, 2022, 7:45am UTC](https://community.metabrainz.org/t/mp3-com-dump-released-on-internet-archive/598064/9 "2022-08-23T07:45:33Z")
What is their Discord server link?
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### Author:  [@sound.and.vision](https://community.metabrainz.org/u/sound.and.vision)
#### Post date: [August 23, 2022, 11:56am UTC](https://community.metabrainz.org/t/mp3-com-dump-released-on-internet-archive/598064/10 "2022-08-23T11:56:48Z")
> **[Join the Internet Archive Discord Server!](https://discord.com/invite/8tmhWQxQ)**
>
> Check out the Internet Archive community on Discord - hang out with 877 other members and enjoy free voice and text chat.
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### Author:  [@sound.and.vision](https://community.metabrainz.org/u/sound.and.vision)
#### Post date: [August 23, 2022, 11:57am UTC](https://community.metabrainz.org/t/mp3-com-dump-released-on-internet-archive/598064/11 "2022-08-23T11:57:12Z")
So I’m currently working to see if I can get a version of this dump functional so that people can access it over the internet… watch this space…
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### Author:  [@sound.and.vision](https://community.metabrainz.org/u/sound.and.vision)
#### Post date: [August 29, 2022, 9:38am UTC](https://community.metabrainz.org/t/mp3-com-dump-released-on-internet-archive/598064/12 "2022-08-29T09:38:34Z")
An update for those concerned.
I have been a busy beaver, reconstructing the website dump from that time and have released it as a public project
[http://mp3-2003.computer-legacy.com/](http://mp3-2003.computer-legacy.com/)
This will allow you to browse through the web-site artist pages and link them back for evidence when submitting to MBz!
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### Author:  [@JamesMP3](https://community.metabrainz.org/u/JamesMP3)
#### Post date: [November 11, 2022, 6:27pm UTC](https://community.metabrainz.org/t/mp3-com-dump-released-on-internet-archive/598064/13 "2022-11-11T18:27:03Z")
Hi - there are still a lot of us around who worked on the [mp3.com](http://mp3.com) code, so if there are particular questions you need answered, ask away.
As far as I remember we never stored anything other than 128kbit tracks; storage was expensive so it wasn’t like there were archives of better bit rate masters somewhere.
What you _really_ want are the YML files that we used to build all the artist pages. (Or the mysql backups, but that’s even more unlikely) Unfortunately, I don’t think we ever served those from web servers; they were used to statically build pages, but we didn’t normally have javascript that fetched data.
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### Author:  [@sound.and.vision](https://community.metabrainz.org/u/sound.and.vision)
#### Post date: [November 11, 2022, 7:44pm UTC](https://community.metabrainz.org/t/mp3-com-dump-released-on-internet-archive/598064/14 "2022-11-11T19:44:29Z")
Hi James
Very cool - I’m still working on this here and there when I get a few moments to spare.
What IA have are the final resultant/rendered HTML pages, and not all of them.
Anything overly dynamic (like genre pages) are gone, but artist pages, artist-info and song-info pages seem to be around.
We also seem to have a lot of the cover art (albeit in classic early internet low resolution) for the tracks.
My next goal is to gather a list of the artist images that are missing, and “touch” the Internet Archive’s WayBackMachine to see if they saved any of them. Get them downloaded and uploaded.
After that, the next thing would be to look to seeing if we can link the tracks in the MP3 Rescue Barge back to the website that I’ve got… this should allow people to find the MP3’s a bit more “naturally”.
Ultimately, my goal is to have this up and running in such a way that I can then start to add the songs in the rescue barge into the MBz DB.
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### Author:  [@jesus2099](https://community.metabrainz.org/u/jesus2099)
#### Post date: [November 11, 2022, 9:29pm UTC](https://community.metabrainz.org/t/mp3-com-dump-released-on-internet-archive/598064/15 "2022-11-11T21:29:04Z")
> [@JamesMP3](#):
>
> As far as I remember we never stored anything other than 128kbit tracks; storage was expensive so it wasn’t like there were archives of better bit rate masters somewhere.
You mean that the audio tracks on DAM CD were burnt from the same 128kbit MP3 files?
DAM CD were CD-R with audio tracks then data session with same tracks as MP3 files.
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### Author:  [@JamesMP3](https://community.metabrainz.org/u/JamesMP3)
#### Post date: [November 13, 2022, 10:38pm UTC](https://community.metabrainz.org/t/mp3-com-dump-released-on-internet-archive/598064/16 "2022-11-13T22:38:07Z")
Yes, the DAM CDs (in theory, stood for “Digital Audio Music”…) were the same 128kbit tracks as far as I remember. I mostly worked on my.mp3 though, not the DAM stuff.
In the very early days when the office was on the General Atomics campus, there was a bell that rang every time a DAM CD was sold.
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### Author:  [@sound.and.vision](https://community.metabrainz.org/u/sound.and.vision)
#### Post date: [November 14, 2022, 10:10am UTC](https://community.metabrainz.org/t/mp3-com-dump-released-on-internet-archive/598064/17 "2022-11-14T10:10:36Z")
> [@JamesMP3](#):
>
> there was a bell that rang every time a DAM CD was sold.
Just reminds me of this scene 😆
[ ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uS1KcjkWdoU)
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### Author:  [@aerozol](https://community.metabrainz.org/u/aerozol)
#### Post date: [November 14, 2022, 8:48pm UTC](https://community.metabrainz.org/t/mp3-com-dump-released-on-internet-archive/598064/18 "2022-11-14T20:48:55Z")
Haha, my kind of workplace!!
YOU SUFFER BUT WHY
(the lyrics, if anyone’s interested)
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### Author:  [@sound.and.vision](https://community.metabrainz.org/u/sound.and.vision)
#### Post date: [November 14, 2022, 8:50pm UTC](https://community.metabrainz.org/t/mp3-com-dump-released-on-internet-archive/598064/19 "2022-11-14T20:50:47Z")
if you haven’t seen it (the show) - i highly recommend
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### Author:  [@bballnchic12](https://community.metabrainz.org/u/bballnchic12)
#### Post date: [January 9, 2023, 3:57am UTC](https://community.metabrainz.org/t/mp3-com-dump-released-on-internet-archive/598064/20 "2023-01-09T03:57:04Z")
First of all a giant thanks for everyone chipping in, especially sound.and.vision the 2003 project. Coincidentally, I found this trying to piece together more information on the [mp3.com](http://mp3.com) rescue barge and thanks to the 2003 project I was able to find out more information on some of the mp3s I’ve been pulling aside and tagging. Exciting! My question is (and maybe no one knows) … “F”, “O”, “R”, seems to be missing from the dump, does anyone happen to know if more is coming or did Jason contribute all that he had. Again, thank you everyone, I’m really glad I found this thread!
[Next page](https://community.metabrainz.org/t/mp3-com-dump-released-on-internet-archive/598064.md?page=2)