Good news for sample-hunters and connoisseurs of the weird: The British Library has made no less than 23,700 rare recordings available for free via its website,

Over 2000 hours of recordings have been unleashed, a tiny fraction of the Library’s total audio haul (which contains more than 1 million discs and 200,000 tapes). Wildlife recordings, Ugandan royal musicians, place-specific soundscapes, oral histories of British jazz, ICA talks, symphony orchestra performances, folk tales, pub singalongs, a survey of English Dialects – you name it, they got it.

Curator Janet Topp Fargion told the BBC : "It’s more than putting theflesh on the bones, there are recordings that don’t exist in any otherform. They give you sound, they give actual events. We are beingtransported all over the world, back in time to different places,different cultures, different peoples".

Check out the collection here.