2025-05-17 Getting SFJAZZ recordings
Something I just saw on fedi: The SFJAZZ Historical Archive has a ton of material online.
From my bookmarks, there is a command line tool to access the Internet Archive. I installed it via my package manager:
sudo apt install internetarchive
Let’s give it a try:
ia download casfjazz_000163
This downloads a bunch of files including two M4A files that I can play.
Download all the files:
ia download --search 'collection:sfjazz' --glob="*.m4a"
Beware, though: With about 750 items and each item being about 250MB, that’ll take about 190GB of disk space and a significant amount of time.
Some exploration: When I look online for Zakir Hussein, I get 11 items.
ia download --search 'collection:sfjazz' --glob="*.m4a"
To list the files (I’m using fish):
for item in (ia search 'collection:sfjazz zakir' --itemlist); ia list $item; end
Notice that there are hits for MP3 files, M4A files, FLAC files, WAV files, etc. That’s a lot of wasted space!
For parallel download:
ia search 'collection:sfjazz zakir' --itemlist | parallel 'ia download {} --glob="*.m4a"'