Music by Year

My music "library" started back with cassette tapes in the 80s. There were songs taped from the radio as well as purchased tapes. Then it moved to CDs. There was also a brief sojourn into CDs. By 2000, digital downloads started to come to play. I had ripped many CDs to MP3s. (I even paid the for Audiograbber shareware - only to have it go free a year later.) I tried using Real music player. It did produce smaller file sizes, but had a tendency to create "noise" in the tracks. Later, I imported all the MP3s into iTunes. From there, I used Audacity to rip all the the cassette tapes and LP records to import to the library. There would also be a few new CDs coming in, as well as digital downloads - mostly from Amazon, Apple or Freegal. There were also a fare number from mp3.com and other sources at the time.

Now that streaming is available, why bother? We pay for the Amazon music membership. You can also listen to anything free on Spotify. These sources do have their problems. There are some things that just do not exist there. (I have not been able to find the Tuba flight of the bumblebee anywhere.) There is also the flexibility of having the music to play anywhere. And the best of all, it makes it easy to do analytics.

What is the Year?

There is a "year" field available in MP3 metadata. It is nice and vague. Just "year". I've interpreted it to be "year when this music was available". For contemporary music, this is usually the year the recording was released. For "greatest hits" and remasters, I try to add the original release date. This often involved some wikipedia hunting. There is also a little fudging. Sometimes, the album may have been released at a different time than the single. I would try to pick the consistent one. Covers could get a little trickier. If it is a faithful recording of a standard, I may go with the original date the song was written. If it takes a significant new spin, I'll use the date it was recorded.

For classical music, I'll use the date the song was "made". This allows for some fudging. It could be the composition date, the publication date or the first date it was performed. I prefer when all are the same, but sometimes there can be significant differences. I do try to end up with something that could be the first time it was "heard" by an audience.

I completed the effort to "date" most of the library. Some songs I did take with "FIX DATE" to indicate that I needed more work. Other songs already had a date that seemed to be about in the realm of reasonable, so I just left it. Maybe later, I could update those.

What Years do I have?

There were plenty of songs from the 80s and 90s. Almost every year was present for the past 100 years. However, there were a few gaps. Wikipedia's Years in Music was a great source for finding key songs from those years. Sometimes I already had a version of the song, just tagged with a different year. Freegal is a good source for finding songs to fill the gaps. However, many libraries are moving away from the downloadable Freegal songs to other streaming options. 

The Library of Congress Jukebox collection was useful for filling in some gaps. However, these were digitizations of old records and not of the highest quality. The Internet Archive Audio Collection also had a lot of items, but had numerous issues. It was hard to search, the quality was typically not very good, and copyright provenance was not very thorough. 

I was able to fairly quickly fill in the gaps for the 1900s. Then it started to get more challenging. Some of the older ones were "common" songs that could be found in the existing collection. I could also slowly fill in some gaps from Freegal. However, with only 5 downloads per week, and a clumsy search, this could take a long time. 

Since we were moving into the classical era, finding high quality, free "modern" recordings of songs seemed be the way to go. Classical Cat is a good index of classical music. It has links to classical recordings on other sites, but alas, does not have years. Many of these are musicians putting up recordings of their own music. Often I would discover performers such as Singakademie Tsukuba and the Gardner Museum that have a large number of recordings from various composers. The big effort is doing searches to find the dates of these compositions.

ISMLP is one of the few sources that has details on dates. Alas, the search for date, doesn't seem to work well, so I would manually chnage the year in a url like  https://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Works_first_published_in_1678. It is geared towards sheet music. However, there is a filer to view items that have recordings. It is fairly thorough with copyright validation, and thus some of the recordings will appear as "non-PD US". Luckily,  can often find a different composition from the year that is publicly available. ISMLP also cross references performers. Thus, after finding a renaissance recording from Phillip Serna, I was able to see that he had many others on the site. 

One quirk I have found with ISMLP is that arrangements will often have their own recordings - often via MIDI. If I can't find a recording for a year, I can search for arrangements and then see if there are recordings there. Sometimes it is an actual MP3. Other Times, it is an MIDI file. I can import that into GarageBand and produce an MP3 from that. More work, but it does fill in gaps.

Going back, years get a little more questionable. ISMLP will have the publication year, which, for older compositions can be a few centuries after the year it was composed. Often, I'll need to search for compositions found on the Wikipedia year page after failing to come up with anything when searching by the year. There may be one year in ISMLP, another in the Wikipedia year page and another in the composer's works listing. Sometimes it just isn't clear when a composition was made, and there could be a range of a decade or more. If I am desperate to fill in a year. 

Another source for individual performances is Musicalion. This is another score site with recordings of songs uploaded. You have to register for scores, but recordings are freely downloadable. The search is pretty much only by composer or performer (with a really long drop down.) It can often be difficult to figure out what the recording is. (It may be a small piece of a greater work, with little metadata.) Luckily, you can often see some details on the sheet music - some even has the year written.

Freegal can also be a good source for older songs. I can search for a year like 1656 and get a list of songs with that in the name. Sometimes this is the actual year when it was made. At other times it may be a random number in the song. Freegal search has plenty of quirks of its own, and sometimes a search for a song will turn up empty, while I later stumble upon it when searching another way.

For each song I find, I try to annotate it with the source URL where it was downloaded as well as another source for the year it was made. As of now, I have recordings for every year from 1654-2024, with many older recordings. I like to sort the library by year and just start playing. It is interesting to see how music evolves - and how some old work sounds similar.