It's important to archive those recordings that are no longer
in production and have virtually no hope and will likley be
lost to time.

My singular project for learning to digitize audio was a recording
i first heard in the 70's on radio. I had airchecked several
tracks off the radio from a program on which I knew the dj.
It was a late night jazz show, so he let an extended number of
tracks run.

time passes and in the early 90's I learn how to use Usenet
newsgroups and discuss music there. The subject of that rare
recording comes up and a fellow in englanf offers to send
me a full cassette of the album.

Years after that I managed to get that 3rd generation
audiocassette onto computer files and use some of the early
p2p progs. to get it online.

Other people should be doing the same, but frankly the p2p
world is a bust-- mostly leechers who will grab your files and
leave an empty directory for you to download.

I got away from the p2p programs not out of fear but out of frustration.

Bittorrents are much better but I don't really know how to
build my own bittorrent files yet. Bittorrent is distributed
computing meaning that many computers are accessing elements
of files at the same time. This is called a 'swarm'. What it
means is that leechers only don't get much.

That album by the way is called "Double Impact". It's
a suite of works written by the German Bandleader Vic Schoene
for two bigbands. Les Brown's band is the other orchestra
playing on the album. I still think it's one of the best
sets of big band arrangements I've ever heard which are
all originals.

This is part of my 'oral history'. It's only because I keep these
memories that the work survives, so far as I know.