Until now, it was pretty hard to play a cylinder on an iPod.

Cylinders, the first recording technology, were popular from the 1880s to the mid-1910s and made of wax or plastic tubes that held music just like a record. The bulky technology lost out to gramophone discs, which were easy to stack.

Quickly cylinders went the way of the CD, er, 8-track.

While even old 78s get reissued on CD, few labels have put out music from this earliest era of audio history, and much of the popular music of that era was thought to be lost.

Enter the heroes.

In November 2005, the University of California Santa Barbara's Special Collections department launched a free, fully downloadable mp3 and .wav file archive for its batch of more than 5,600 recently digitized cylinder records. You can check it out here: http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/index.php .

"We thought it was going to be something that would have an academic use and a steady but slow stream of users," said David Seubert, the collection's project manager. "I checked the logs for the first two weeks and we had 200,000 mp3s downloaded. We were completely hammered!"

University of California libraries have been collecting early recordings since the 1960s, and when Seubert came to the UC Santa Barbara library in 1998 he found that there was an immediate need to save the fragile cylinder collection. In 2003, after a successful pilot program, the library won a $350,000 grant to digitize the collection. Seubert estimated that each two- to four-minute cylinder took an hour to catalog and digitize.

The biggest problem in setting up the project was deciding how to play back the recordings. Cylinders were listened to on machines that reproduced sound acoustically -- a needle physically transferred sound into a horn amplifier -- but this primitive method left a lot of the cylinder's sound untapped.

Starting in 1998, a French company began to make Archeophones: electrical cylinder players. Seubert says that these machines let listeners hear cylinders even better than back in the day. The library went with this over the authentically scratchy sound of the past. "It's not that faithful to how they were heard at the time, because we chose to reflect all the information that is in the grooves."

Because the collection was meant for scholarly -- not general -- audiences, Seubert's team opted for minimum noise reduction. The hiss, clicks and pops of the original cylinders add a patina of age. Those who want cleaner recordings can manipulate the files themselves using the raw .wav files. This is all part of Seubert's commitment to making this project free, accessible and open to the public.

In addition to classical, religious and marching band music of the day, the cylinder archive contains hundreds of little known or forgotten performers from one of America's longest running forms of popular music -- vaudeville.

Unlike early jazz, blues and country, there hasn't been much interest in rekindling listeners for this 19th century form of public performance, theater, and comedy. With its use of ethnic dialects and remnants of blackface minstrels, the music of this era is often tough listening for contemporary audiences.

"It was the era of mass migration and any ethnic group was fair game back then," says Seubert. He thinks record companies might be afraid of reissuing such insensitive recordings, even as historical documents, but thinks that placing them online "opens up a dialogue" and gives people a chance to think how far -- or not so far -- we've come.

Since, as Seubert says, "there's no vaudeville section in Borders," the project's Web site offers two radio programs to introduce browsers to tunes from the era: one focuses on early black composers and the other is a general survey of the collection. The more adventurous can browse the collection or search by keyword. "There's a lot of really good music," Seubert said, waiting to be rediscovered. And, of course, pop wouldn't be pop if there weren't throwaways. "Frankly, there's also a lot of dogs," Seubert admits.

POP THEN AND NOW: THE TIMES, THEY AREN'T A-CHANGIN'

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asap contributor Daphne Carr relates to 1906.

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