The Rescue Barge Barge: MP3.com Dataset

Archive.org has a sizable collection of mp3.com audio in The mp3.com Rescue Barge. 960.6 GB is nothing to sneeze at! But a few years ago I came across a big list of download.mp3.com links, many of which were already hosted on the Wayback Machine - and a great deal of them, not represented in their own Barge! To remedy this issue, as well as collect IDv3 metadata on all the audios I can find, I started the Rescue Barge Barge project to fill in the gaps with some storage loaned from a friend and then a larger drive I bought myself. The result is a hoard of 533,046 mp3.com mp3s (counting duplicates) from bitrates from 24kbps to 128kbps, totaling 1.78TB!

While I don't believe I have means to share the downloaded files themselves due to the sheer size of the archive, I compiled a huge CSV with everything one needs to look through it with the Barge + Wayback Machine source URLs, including artist, title, genre, and comment metadata. For less than relevant - but hopefully interesting technical details, see my blog post on The MP3.com Rescue Barge Barge.

MP3.com Dataset (zipped CSV, 27.5MB; 131MB decompressed)

To use the CSV, I'd recommend a newer version of Excel with CSV parsing. Make sure you check the "my data has a header" option, and set the all text columns to Text (Artist, Title namely) to prevent it from evaluating some of them as math expressions.

MP3.com Dataset (XLSX, 54MB)

This spreadsheet copy already has it done for you, so you can open it in Excel / Google Sheets / LibreOffice.

MP3.com Playlist Generator

If you wanna discover and shuffle some tunes, or whatever else might lurk within the Barge, this is the tool for you.

The applet is available here and picks from a random selection of Barge tunes/recordings. I also have a mini version on my iPod player interface.

Try it in your browser Try it in dcbPod

MP3.com Radio

I have a live radio of a small subset of the collection, hosted on my VM. Uptime is somewhat sporadic, so it might not work all the time.

Listen in (HTTP) See what's playing

MP3.com Somnol Postings

My MP3.com Dataset post:

• "The MP3.com Rescue Barge Barge"

My friend mariteaux's posts on MP3.com (he's our specialist in these matters):

• "The Tragedy of MP3.com"
• "How Did MP3.com Play MP3s?"
• "MP3.com Lives On (on CD-ROM)"
• "MP3.com Lives On (Part 2)"
• "Revisiting the Official MP3.com Guide to MP3s"

Related Projects

Look at some of these other resources for MP3.com history and preservation. I'm going to try to update this with more to reflect the current state of MP3.com research projects.

• The MP3.com Rescue Barge: The Internet Archive's own collection of MP3.com audio.
• MP3.com Archive Search by 3310: covers the Rescue Barge and ~6,300 more tracks. Search by title or artist. 252,192 indexed as of writing.
• MP3.com Resurrection Project by Computer-Legacy.com: A static copy of the 2003 MP3.com site with many artist pages restored.