WFMU's Beware of the Blog: Treasure Trove of Found Sound Vocal Workouts

The majority of these recordings were made singing along with records while playing with tape recorders or computers. The Fred Weber tapes were made in 1949 on a wire recording device while Fred listened to the musical countdown on WNEW-AM. Fred gave the radio and wire recorder his undivided attention.
Many of these recordings were retrieved from thrift shops decades later by The Professor, his cohorts and assorted WFMU staffers and listeners.
Then there are the 'mic in track' recordings. For a brief, glorious moment during the heyday of Napster, large numbers of homemade computer recordings were made available worldwide, through an accidental default setting on people's home computers. If people with Napster accounts made recordings on their computers and accepted the recording with the default title of 'mic in track' then those recordings were made available to anyone smart enough to search the Napster network for those three beautiful keywords.