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Welcome to Pandora Records

History

Hello, music lovers!

Pandora Records was established in 1973. The business was active for over ten years, finally succumbing when the LP died because of the CD. The master tapes (and LPs when tapes were missing) have been archived; in addition, other selections may be found in the contrib directory. This site is in the process of being refined. It will be done sooner if there were some volunteers to help.

We are grateful to Ibiblio for hosting Pandora at this site.

The mirror hebb.mit also provides high speed public access. hebb.mit.edu

On hebb you will see a web page, scroll down for the tree.

The original site pan.zipcon pan.zipcon is often useful for quick perusal of readmes and indices.html. It should not be used for downloading music files. There is a partial mirror with other interesting selections at cuba.calyx.nl

wget Examples

To download or update all ogg files from ibiblio

wget -r -N -nH --cut-dirs=3 -np http://URL

where URL=music.ibiblio.org/pub/multimedia/pandora/vorbis/

To get all the violin music just change the cut to 4, and the URL to:

URL=music.ibiblio.org/pub/multimedia/vorbis/violin

Notice that cut refers to the number of directories between the directory of interest and the parent directory.

Similarly to download the violin directory of mp3 files from hebb

URL=hebb.mit.edu/FreeMusic/Pandora/mp3/violin

while cut=3

Removing index.html files

To get rid of junk files like index.html?D:

find . -name "index.html?*" -exec rm {} \; -print

The index.html files should be retained. They are needed to use the directory links in the copy.

wget Setup in Windows

This section needs updating. Nevertheless it may be helpful. Go to Heiko Herold's Windows wget spot and get the latest stable version of wget. In case you don't feel like reading, you're probably looking for the table cell with the bright blue background. Get the binary for the most recent stable version (last we checked, it was 1.8.2), and don't forget the SSL libraries .

Unzip all these files into a directory; we suggest C:\bin. Once you've done that, hold down the Windows key and press Break; this will open System Properties. (Alternately, right-click on My Computer and select Properties.) Head on over to the Advanced tab and click on Environment Variables.

In the System variables section, you should see a variable called path (case doesn't matter). If you look at it, you'll notice a semicolon-delimited list of directory names. Edit it and append, say, ;C:\bin to it. Press OK, and then OK again.

Incidentally, this variable is called %path% or %PATH%, depending on how much you love your Shift key. Now, open up a command prompt with Start -> Run -> cmd.exe and type in wget --help. You should see wget's help screen scroll by; if you get an error message along the lines of "bad command or file name", the system isn't looking in the right place. If you get a dialog box that complains about not finding something like "SSLEAY", you probably forgot to put the SSL libraries in C:\bin along with wget.exe.

Now, assuming you get wget's help screen to come up, you might think it scrolls by too quickly. In that case, run wget --help > wgethelp.txt and read wget's help screen in Notepad or your favorite text editor.

Let's try out a sample run. Make a new directory, say, " contest pieces" and go into it with cd "contest pieces". Now run

wget -m -np -nd -A .ogg http://pan.zipcon.net/vorbis/flute/Murray/Contest_pieces/

and wait for it to finish. That's it!

wget Setup in OS X

  1. In the Finder, press Command-K (Go -> Connect to Server...) and enter http://packages.opendarwin.org/ in the Address dialog. Do note that this is over WebDAV, so don't expect the snappiness you're used to from local file systems.
  2. Go to the mpkgs folder.
  3. Go to the net folder.
  4. Double-click on the most recent wget package (currently wget-1.8.2.mpkg).
  5. After installing, wget will be available at /opt/local/bin/wget.
  6. Test it out! Open up Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/T erminal.app) and type:
    mkdir testDownload; cd testDownload; /opt/l ocal/bin/wget -m -np -nd -A .ogg http://pan.zipcon.net/vorbis/flute/Murray/Contes t_pieces/

Playing Files (Warning! This info is not all up-to-date)

The music files here are in the Ogg Vorbis format; if you're in Windows and need a player, try Winamp 2 (oddly enough, it’s been updated more recently than Winamp 3 and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future), foobar2000, or Zinf. Mind you, this isn’t a complete list; vorbis.com has a slightly more exhaustive catalog.

If you’re using a unixlike operating system, your player probably already plays Ogg Vorbis files. If not, try XMMS or ogg123, the latter being included with the vorbis-tools package.

If you’re on a Mac, try Frogg (unfortunately, it only will play one file at a time). If you’re feeling spendy, try Audion or MacAmp.

License

These files are available for free download subject to the EFF OAL.

Thanks

This website is in part an offspring of the work of Glenn White, the father and champion of realistic recording in Seattle. Some of the recordings were made and repaired by him.

Thanks for the contrbutions of the Sweep and Audacity editors.

Very special thanks to Benjamin Weste Pearre for his needed advice. Ben has an interesting collection of free music at hebb.mit.edu. Ben mirrors pandora at hebb.mit.edu. Thanks also to Mr. Boink who has a partial mirror at cuba.calyx.nl.

Thanks to Giuliano Pochini for his program to convert directory links to hypertext links, and for his diligence in finding errors in the postings.

Thanks Nathan Sharfi for his help and and criticsm; for the info on ways of dealing with Windows and Macs; and for collecting and refining all the information into this one html file.

Thanks to Beni Cherniavsky for his help with the Sweep and Audacity editors.

Thanks to Gary Louie for restoring tapes and digitizing them.

Thanks to Ivor Philips for supplying gifs,

Thanks to Fred Stutzman for helping me move to Ibiblio.

Contact

Comments? Questions? Mail gold@gas.zipcon.net.

hosted by ibiblio