deadseapianorolls

about

deadseapianorolls (dspr) is a site that digitally archives musical records that cannot be obtained from the source. Here, “source” refers to the artists, bands and/or record labels themselves. This includes obtaining physical copies as well as digital ones; so, deadseapianorolls does not provide records that are in print, nor does it provide ones that have digital copies available from the record labels and/or artists/bands. Instead, when presenting discographies, deadseapianorolls refers its readers to the places where they can legitimately obtain those records that are available to own in one form or another.

deadseapianorolls is organized by artist/band, each one having its own entry that contains all of their (known) discography and bootleg material.

help is strongly encouraged

It is strongly encouraged that anyone who finds any of the following:

…does contact deadseapianorolls with copies of missing recordings, superior copies of recordings, and corrections/additions. Also note that filling in missing image entries (usually, cover art) and providing superior copies of images is similarly appreciated. Because deadseapianorolls is, by nature, a digital archive, exact CD rips from officially released CDs are preferred (as well as official internet releases in lossless formats). However, in the unideal case, other sources are acceptable to use instead, e.g. vinyl “rips”, and other, more lossy media. deadseapianorolls places an emphasis on retaining copies that are as close to “the original” as possible, so sloppy methods and lossy compression should be avoided when at all possible. For compression, instead prefer FLAC for audio, WEBP with the -lossless option (or just PNG, for compatibility) for images, and LZMA (or other similar general-purpose lossless compression algorithms) for everything else.

distribution listings

Each distribution listed on deadseapianorolls contains information about, among other things, the formatting/encoding and source for that distribution. Not all formats and encodings are created equal, and likewise, not all sources are created equal. To aid comprehension, formats/encodings and sources are color-coded using a set of three colors:

Do note that just because a format/encoding is higher-quality on its own, that does not necessarily mean that the actual content is higher-quality. That is partly why sources are listed and are ranked according to these three tiers as well. A lossless format from a dubious source could easily have been re-encoded from some lossy encoding, or any number of other mishaps could have occurred.

Distributions that have a source listed as “[net]” are sourced from unknown, anonymous, and/or no-longer-extant internet sources.

Variable bitrate (VBR) distributions’ bitrates are listed as averages, with an indication that the bitrate is variable.

Distributions that contain video are marked with the following character: 📹 (U+1f4f9).

sources for discographical (and artist) information

The discographical information (release titles, release dates, track listings, &c.), as well as some of the artist-specific information (band membership, dates of formation, &c.) presented on deadseapianorolls is typically sourced from some combination of the following resources:

Hornbostel–Sachs

Hornbostel–Sachs classifications for some musical instruments are included using HTML <data> elements (if you are using a visual browser, this should show up as the main text having a dotted underline, which you can hover over to reveal the associated title text). These will be given as “H–S” followed by a series of numbers (and possibly also dots, hyphens, and/or plus signs). Here is an example:

The piano is a kind of chordophone.

The intent of deadseapianorolls is to not distribute recordings that can otherwise be obtained from the artist/band/record label itself. That way, no one’s revenue is lost, and credit is always given wherever credit is applicable. In addition, deadseapianorolls is entirely nonprofit; indeed, it is, furthermore, entirely zero revenue. deadseapianorolls does not accept donations, does not advertise, and does not have any other forms of revenue. deadseapianorolls exists solely for educational purposes, and for the advancement of information preservation.

That being said, if you are a legitimate copyright holder of any of the works that are linked to by deadseapianorolls, and you would like to have one or more of said work(s) removed from deadseapianorolls, please just contact deadseapianorolls as appropriate, and the work(s) will be expunged as soon as possible.

To the extent possible under law, all copyright and related or neighboring rights to deadseapianorolls have been waived. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/.

For access to the source, see here.

CC0 (public domain)

The deadseapianorolls logo is due to Andrew Doane from the Noun Project (CC BY 3.0).