New bot: @78_sampler, serving up old records
The Internet Archive hosts an incredible collection of over 25,000 professionally digitized 78rpm records. The great thing about a catalog that large is that, if you know what you want, you’re likely to find it. On the other hand, if you just want to browse it can be overwhelming and even intimidating. Each item could possibly be a delight, but it’s difficult to even think about individual records in the face of such a huge archive.
In that sense, would-be browsers face similar challenges with the Great 78 Project as they do with the Pomological Watercolor Collection—an archive I’ve worked with a lot. Sensing that similarity, I decided to build a tool like @pomological to help surface individual records.
@78_sampler tweets every two hours with a randomly selected record from the Archive’s collection. It was important to me that the audio fit smoothly and natively into a Twitter timeline, so I decided to render each tune into a video file using the Archive’s still image of the record as the visual. Twitter limits videos to 2:20—exactly 140 seconds, cute—which is shorter than most 78 tunes, so while rendering the video I truncate the clip at that point with a short audio fade at the end.
The code to do all this is a short Python script which I’ve posted online. It relies on ffmpeg to do the video encoding. Crafting ffmpeg commands is famously convoluted, and it’s a little frustrating to format those commands to be called from Python. Maybe that’s something I’ll do differently in the future but, for now, this works and I can dip my cup into the deep Archive well with a little more ease than before.