We backed up Spotify (metadata and music files). It’s distributed in bulk torrents (~300TB). It’s the world’s first “preservation archive” for music which is fully open (meaning it can easily be mirrored by anyone with enough disk space), with 86 million music files, representing around 99.6% of listens.

When will Anna fly too close to the sun?

We backed up Spotify (metadata and music files). It’s distributed in bulk torrents (~300TB), grouped by popularity.

This release includes the largest publicly available music metadata database with 256 million tracks and 186 million unique ISRCs.

It’s the world’s first “preservation archive” for music which is fully open (meaning it can easily be mirrored by anyone with enough disk space), with 86 million music files, representing around 99.6% of listens.

  • anarchiddy@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    2·
    15 days ago

    Huh, when I read the press release I thought it was saying they were going to break them down into smaller chunks sorted by popularity

    • dead [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      2·
      15 days ago

      The article says that they archived 256 million songs. The article says that they want to distribute the 256 million songs in a list of “bulk torrents”. The article says the purpose of the project is to create an “authoritative list of torrents aiming to represent all music ever produced”,

      If you have 256 million files and your goal is to have a list of bulk torrents. How many songs would you have per torrent? If you put 1 million songs per torrent, it would still be 256 torrents, over 1 tb each in size.

      A torrent client can only handle 500-2000 torrents before it starts going wonky, depending on which client you use. If they split the 250 million songs into 2000 torrents, it would be 100k songs per torrent.

      Currently on the Anna’s archive website, it only has the torrent for the metadata for the songs. The metadata torrent for the 256 million songs is 200 gb on it’s own. This is only the text data for the songs.

      Each torrent will likely be hundreds of gigabytes.

      • anarchiddy@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        2·
        15 days ago

        yea, I guess I was thinking 1tb was at least a manageable size for a homebrewer, especially if you were only interested in archiving the top 1 or 2 million songs.

        It’s still not a casually sized torrent by any means, but it’s a lot more manageable than 300tb. If you’re someone who wants to archive that much media, you probably have enough tech literacy to manage several torrent clients. The article also says they’re willing to make individual songs available on their website, “if people are interested in it”.