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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"'

#Music