Congratulations, very cool. BUT... I can't help but feel this is an... impolite?... use of archive.org?
I see archive.org as being a repository, not a streaming service. I would rather they spent their money on content ingestion and resilient content storage, not on having to scale up their outbound bandwidth capacity.
What would polite look like? Download the content off archive.org, then stream it from your own server.
Now, I know the IA are perfectly happy to let you do this, and of course part of their mandate is to make content accessible, which necessitates having low-friction ways to download it. But still, I would hate to see IA become a CDN-first, archive-second.
Maybe a compromise would be to suggest that users make a donation?:
I agree, I don't think this is a impolite usage of Internet Archive's resources. I think they would love it. Though I also agree that putting a donation link to the source is also a good idea.
A couple of years ago, I created a simple “Donate to the Internet Archive” logo for a site I made using IA resources. It links to the IA’s donation page. Anyone is welcome to use the logo on their own sites:
Well, you could certainly just download from archive.org for the first-time usage of any particular song and then cache them from there. Like being your own CDN.
This is a good idea. I did this with about 38,000 books in the public domain and hosted and indexed the text files on the page so I could do quick full text searches of all of them: https://www.locserendipity.com/Google.html. Interestingly, it is not nearly as good as a RegEx search of a directory of the same content, revealing some inconsistencies in their search algorithm (at least for custom search engines).
donations are a fine thing, so is discovery, anything that helps to surface quality will long term perhaps help the archive prove its worth and ensure a positive attitude towards their endeavours.
I see archive.org as being a repository, not a streaming service. I would rather they spent their money on content ingestion and resilient content storage, not on having to scale up their outbound bandwidth capacity.
What would polite look like? Download the content off archive.org, then stream it from your own server.
Now, I know the IA are perfectly happy to let you do this, and of course part of their mandate is to make content accessible, which necessitates having low-friction ways to download it. But still, I would hate to see IA become a CDN-first, archive-second.
Maybe a compromise would be to suggest that users make a donation?:
https://archive.org/donate/