Divia - wake- It’s the world’s first “preservation archive” for music which is fully open

 

PHILOSOPHY OF CARE

Dr. Harris is a proponent of the “less is more” philosophy, wherein the least invasive surgical procedures are explored as a primary consideration, with a deliberate effort to avoid fusion whenever possible. His ultimate objective is to expedite patients’ return to an active and improved state of well-being while minimizing their recovery 

DR LIAM HARRIS Orthopedic & Neurosurgical Spine Surgeon

7 Podcasts for Bookworms

In a world filled with digital distractions, these shows will help you indulge, develop or rekindle a love for reading.

This free app turned my phone into a portable film scanner

How to Geek: “Photography has undergone immense changes over the last few decades, and as a result, you probably have a family photo collection in a variety of formats. More recent photos and videos are stored digitally on your devices or in the cloud, while older ones could be stashed away as printed photos, scrapbooks, or even film negatives and slides. If all or part of a photo collection is made up of film negatives, it can be hard to take a casual trip down memory lane or share images with others. 

Luckily, there’s a way to use your smartphone to scan film negatives, turning them into digital images that can be freely edited, shared, or backed up in the cloud. Whether you’re still shooting on film (the nostalgia factor is bringing 35mm film cameras back) or are working with old family archives, various free apps can help convert negatives into digital photos. 

They all work basically the same way, but the one I used was FilmBox because of its popularity and support for both iOS and Android. As someone taking on the task of preserving my family’s photo collection and getting into the world of half-frame film photography in 2025, I was surprised to find FilmBox surpassed my expectations..”

Anna’s Archive rips 86 million of the most popular songs on Spotify

-archive.li/blog, 2025-12-20 “We backed up Spotify (metadata and music files). It’s distributed in bulk torrents (~300TB), grouped by popularity. This release includes the largest publicly available music metadata database with 256 million tracks and 186 million unique ISRCs. 

It’s the world’s first “preservation archive” for music which is fully open (meaning it can easily be mirrored by anyone with enough disk space), with 86 million music files, representing around 99.6% of listens. Anna’s Archive normally focuses on text (e.g. books and papers). We explained in “The critical window of shadow libraries” that we do this because text has the highest information density. 

But our mission (preserving humanity’s knowledge and culture) doesn’t distinguish among media types. Sometimes an opportunity comes along outside of text. This is such a case. A while ago, we discovered a way to scrape Spotify at scale. We saw a role for us here to build a music archive primarily aimed at preservation. 

Generally speaking, music is already fairly well preserved. There are many music enthusiasts in the world who digitized their CD and LP collections, shared them through torrents or other digital means, and meticulously catalogued them.However, these existing efforts have some major issues:

1. Over-focus on the most popular artists. There is a long tail of music which only gets preserved when a single person cares enough to share it. And such files are often poorly seeded.
2. Over-focus on the highest possible quality. Since these are created by audiophiles with high end equipment and fans of a particular artist, they chase the highest possible file quality (e.g. lossless FLAC). This inflates the file size and makes it hard to keep a full archive of all music that humanity has ever produced.
3. No authoritative list of torrents aiming to represent all music ever produced. An equivalent of our book torrent list (which aggregate torrents from LibGen, Sci-Hub, Z-Lib, and many more) does not exist for music.

This Spotify scrape is our humble attempt to start such a “preservation archive” for music. Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start. Before we dive into the details of this collection, here is a quick overview:

• Spotify has around 256 million tracks. This collection contains metadata for an estimated 99.9% of tracks.
• We archived around 86 million music files, representing around 99.6% of listens. It’s a little under 300TB in total size.
• See also Ars Technica: “World’s largest shadow library made a 300TB copy of Spotify’s most streamed songs. Spotify is reportedly investigating how much music Anna’s Archive scraped.”
• See also The Verge – Pirate library rips 86 million of the most popular songs on Spotify – “Spotify says it has launched new protections against “anti-copyright attacks” after the open-source library / pirate activist group Anna’s Archive announced it’s ripped 86 million songs from the platform that it plans to make available in torrents, as reported earlier by Billboard. According to the group, “We have archived around 86 million music files …”