500 Box

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 Newsgroup 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, and these will be shared with the group in the near future. The plan is to initially rip the shows to lossless flac for archiving and for those interested in having the shows available this way, and follow this up with a high quality mp3 transfer for sharing, after the manner of the 400 Box series. The shows appear at first listening to be very good quality FM mono recordings.

Tape And Date Pages

 * Tape ID numbers will be assigned in the order ripped with CB numbers, starting with the first available show from 1988-09-25 (CB001). Tracklistings will be readily available from the date pages as they are ripped, due to Colin's methodical cataloguing.

Tapes (first 17)

 * Below are the first 17 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-CB017

CB001: 1988-09-25 SIG

CB002

CB003

CB004

CB005

CB006

CB007

CB008

CB009

CB010

CB011

CB012

CB013

CB014

CB015

CB016

CB017