500 Box

[edit] Background

This is a collection of somewhere between 500-530 mostly complete John Peel Shows ranging from 1988-2004. In August 2008, inspired by the interest shown in the 400 Box, Peel Mailing List member Colin Bray requested help with digitising the tapes, all of which came from his own personal collection and had been partially tracklisted by him (indeed, all tapes seen so far contain handwritten tracklistings on the cover). As a result of this initial plea, he came to an arrangement with Newsgroup member So It Goes to begin the loaning and transfer of the material. Colin despatched a list of the tapes in table form to Steve (So It Goes), Steve (saipanda), Richard and Rocker.

Two factors immediately appeared to compromise the work to be done on this. Firstly, a large proportion of Colin's dates appeared to be inaccurate, listing days when there were no shows broadcast. Secondly, some of the shows had already been circulated via the group and the 17-DVD Torrent compilation. Nevertheless, the importance of having a large, previously unavailable slice of Peel's autumn and winter years was too good an opportunity to pass up. Colin suggested 'cherry-picking' the collection as a way of getting started, and Steve (SIG) chose a group of tapes mainly from 1995, an area under-represented by already available material.

Consequently, the first batch of 17 tapes arrived at Steve's home in South Korea on 2008-09-18,

The first 17 tapes arrive at SIG's house
and the initial batch is now complete: the tapes were returned to Colin on 2009-01-25. The second arrived on 2008-10-30 and was completed on 2009-02-14. Batch three arrived on 2009-02-10, and was completed on 2009-08-10. (Note that the ripper from CB061 onwards will be Colin himself.) All shows are ripped to high quality mp3 transfer for sharing. They are very good quality FM mono and stereo recordings, with very few instances of tape dropout or distortion.

Tape ID numbers will be assigned in the order ripped with CB numbers, starting with the first available show from 1988-09-26 (CB001). Tracklistings will be readily available from the date pages as they are ripped: this has been facilitated by Colin's methodical cataloguing.

Below are the tapes received. This section is intended to give an overview of tape status, plus links for information on the tapes themselves and the dates they cover.

CB001: 26 September 1988 (incomplete show) SIG SHARED

CB004 and CB005: 14 April 1995 SIG Already shared at [1]. To avoid unnecessary duplication, these will not be shared.

CB012: 28 May 1997 (incomplete show) SIG SHARED

CB019: 24 May 1990 SIG SHARED

CB020: 28 October 1990 (incomplete show) SIG SHARED