Audio News for February 15, 2013

by | Feb 15, 2013 | Audio News

Selected 2013 Grammy Awards – 

World music album: The Living Room Sessions Part 1, Ravi Shankar.
Rock album: El Camino, The Black Keys.
Blues album: Locked Down, Dr. John.
Bluegrass album: Nobody Knows You, Steep Canyon Rangers.
New age album: Echoes of Love, Omar Akram.
Jazz vocal album: Radio Music Society, Esperanza Spalding.
Jazz instrumental album: Unity Band, Pat Metheny Unity Band.
Large jazz ensemble album: Dear Diz (Every Day I Think of You), Arturo Sandoval.
Score soundtrack album: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross.
Song written for visual media: Safe & Sound (From The Hunger Games), Taylor Swift, John Paul White, Joy Williams.
Musical theater album: Once: A New Musical, Steve Kazee, Cristin Milioti.
Instrumental composition: Mozart [ Images ] Goes Dancing, Chick Corea.
Orchestral performance: Adams: Harmonielehre & Short Ride in a Fast Machine, Michael Tilson Thomas (San Francisco Symphony).
Opera recording: Wagner, Der Ring des Nibelungen, James Levine and Fabio Luisi.
Choral performance: Life & Breath: Choral Works by Rene Clausen, Charles Bruffy.

Library of Congress National Recording Preservation Plan – A  32-recommendations blueprint for saving America’s recorded sound heritage for future generations has been unveiled. The plan is the cumulative result of more than a decade of work by the Library and its National Recording Preservation Board to save music, radio broadcasts, interviews, historic speeches, field recordings, comedy records, author readings and other recordings not already forever lost. The Library of Congress is the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution.

Experts estimate that over half of the titles recorded on cylinder records have not survived and the archives of one of the leading radio networks is lost. A fire at the storage facility of a large record company ruined an unknown number of master recordings. Many key recordings made by George Gershwin, Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland and others have been lost. Many rights holders have not allowed researchers or the general public to listen to recordings they legally control.  One survey determined that rights owners have only made available 14% of the historic recordings that they control. Despite the development of the Internet, few historical recordings can be made available online due to aspects of the U.S. copyright law.

Experts from across the country in the fields of law, audio preservation, library/archive management, business, digital technology and cultural history developed the recommendations. Among them are: Construct environmentally-controlled storage facilities to provide optimal conditions for long-term preservation, establish an Audio-Preservation Resource Directory website, establish best practices for creating and preserving born-digital audio files, apply federal copyright law to sound recordings created before February 15, 1972, develop a basic licensing agreement to enable on-demand secure streaming by libraries and archives of out-of-print recordings.

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