A Treasure Trove of Musical History

Are you jaded with the melodic offerings from Pandora, Last.fm and iTunes? If you're a music freak and need something new, check out the National Jukebox from the Library of Congress. Pick a playlist, search by artist or genre, or try a sampler of over 10,000 rare and historic sound recordings. You can select tracks from different categories and add them to a playlist. There's also a neat feature, Day by Day, where you can pick a date and focus on music recorded that day.

One of the neat things about this project is that it has all the hallmarks of library organization: narrowing results by language, date range, artist, and place, in addition to excellent Search and Browse features. They've even included a full-text interactive version of the Victrola Book of the Opera to help put many of the recordings in context. If you're new to the Jukebox, there's a First Time Here page that covers the basics.

Thankfully I've got headphones in, so no one needs to overhear the 32 different yodeling tracks I'm listening to for the sake of "research".