Tinfoil—Glenn Sage—collects the earliest sounds recorded by humankind (and has an online store). There are digitizations of wax cylinders, antique phonographs, and other experimental technologies. This is, ironically, an old website dependent on an old digital format: RealMedia. The bad news is you'll need the player; the good news is it's free (of charge) and under active development and VLC comes with it.
Tinfoil.com offers a free service to owners and institutions holding early brown wax sound recordings to digitally transfer and catalog their recordings.
Here is the way it works: The cylinder records may be either shipped to me (see packing guidelines below) or, for larger collections, I can work on-site. The records are carefully cataloged and recordings digitally transferred. Along with your records returned, you receive a digital archive on compact disc(s) of your recordings, plus detailed cataloging notes. I ask that you pay the shipping and insurance costs in sending the records to me; I pay the return shipping and insurance. Tinfoil.com archives copies of the digital cylinder transfers. In addition, some of the recordings may appear in future Tinfoil.com publications (with appropriate acknowledgements, unless you wish to be anonymous) which helps support the ongoing preservation work of Tinfoil.com.
Brief background: I am an early sound recordings preservationist – not a record collector – trained in Computer Science, and living in Portland, Oregon. I have worked with institutions and collectors for many years to preserve, study, catalog, and publish the earliest sound recordings – generally brown wax cylinders from 1888 through the early 1900's. Unlike celluloid cylinders such as Edison's Blue Amberols (which will probably outlive us all), time is not kind to wax cylinders, particularly brown wax cylinders.
I saw material like this when I visited the Library of Congress's audiovisual archives in Culpeper, Virginia. The difficulty of preservation and the deterioration of the original media were powerful motives.
