Contact: pmcdap.org@gmail.com
PMCDAP (Production Music CD Archive Project) is an effort to preserve and catalog the hidden world of production music, also known as library music or more informally stock music, released on CDs or other optical media. Our eventual goal is to preserve every single production music album or library ever released on CD or DVD (including variants of each album), from the early 1980s to present. This is a long term goal that our founder has had for several years, evolving from a personal collection to a community effort on a much larger scale. This project was inspired by Redump and similar video game preservation projects.
Production music, also known as library music or more informally stock music, is a type of music composed specifically for companies to use in productions such as movies, TV shows, radio, and more recently, video games. This type of music is not custom made for a specific franchise, rather it is available for licensed use in any production. Similar to other stock media, production music is usually never commercially sold in stores to consumers. Production music must instead be obtained directly from the labels or their representatives in various countries. One of the most well-known production music labels in the U.S. is APM (Associated Production Music), which claims to be the largest American production music library. APM also represents many foreign, mostly European libraries such as KPM (UK) and Sonoton (Germany) in North America.
Production music has existed since the early 20th century. This type of music is especially useful to lower-budget productions that can't afford a dedicated musician, like John Williams of Star Wars/Indiana Jones fame, to compose a custom soundtrack. Higher-budget productions also use production music in combination with an original score to create a more colorful and varied soundtrack. There are numerous examples of production music in media, including classic sitcoms like Monty Python's Flying Circus (as well as its three movie tie-ins), contemporary TV shows like SpongeBob SquarePants, and big-name video games like Fallout: New Vegas.
Nothing lasts forever, and this is true for CDs unless we make an effort to ensure that these get preserved for as long as possible. Production music, and other stock media, is especially a concern, as these usually were not available to the public (i.e. sold in stores), and few, if any companies still release production music on CDs with the advancement in technology as digital media becomes dominant. Additionally, some albums have been re-released in often inferior revised editions that may remove and/or replace tracks, usually due to legal issues, and the original becomes discontinued. Or, in some cases, entire albums have become discontinued and are simply no longer available anywhere. An example of this is the label FirstCom, where the majority of their older releases are simply unavailable. Thus, the only way to obtain original versions of revised albums, or discontinued albums is via second-hand CDs. For PMCDAP, it is important that we not only preserve production music on CD, but also that we do it the right way.
While it's true that many labels such as KPM have digitally re-released much of their content on contemporary streaming or download services (e.g. Spotify), we do not believe this to be true music preservation, and is a poor substitute to the original media. For one thing, many of these albums may be missing tracks, whether that be due to shorter/alternate versions of tracks being omitted, or legal issues, as discussed above. Many (most) services also have their music in lossy compressed formats, meaning that it uses a low bitrate to decrease size and/or bandwidth, sacrificing some quality. An audiophile would be able to tell the difference. Furthermore, digital content lacks some of the "goodies" that CDs have, including (obviously) all the artwork and full descriptions, and sometimes other cool information such as the history behind the music on the album or details about the composers/musicians.
In short, we preserve production music CDs regardless if they can be listened to online for essentially the same reasons why video game preservation projects preserve CD and floppy disk images of old games that can still be bought on modern services like Steam and GOG.
As stated on the bottom of every page, this website does not provide downloads to the actual disc images; only hashes and scans. We want to ensure that this project stays afloat and stays out of any legal trouble, so don't provide them here, much like ROM database websites. While obviously the files themselves need to be, and are being preserved, they are not found here. In other words, if you're looking for CD image files here, go elsewhere. And we will not tell you where.
As stated before, PMCDAP is not a piracy website, and this site does not provide downloads to the actual disc images; only details about the files. We want to ensure that this project will stay alive, and keep it out of any legal trouble. The scans provided are for reference and educational purposes, and we do not claim ownership over these images.
A problem with MP3, OGG, AAC, or other files is that they are lossy audio formats, meaning that they have been compressed with sacrificed quality in order to reduce size, and when decompressed, do not contain a 1:1 copy of the original CD audio. WAV is a 100% uncompressed audio format, meaning that no data is lost, but has a larger file size than other audio formats. FLAC, while compressed, is lossless, meaning that when uncompressed, it retains a perfect copy of the original CD audio.
For PMCDAP, we accept either BIN/CUE, IMG/CCD/SUB for audio or mixed-mode CDs (the former preferred), alternatively FLAC/WAV (with CUE sheets) for audio CDs, or ISO files for pure data CDs (CD-ROMs) and DVD images.
The original intent of the project was to preserve all stock media - production music, sound effects, images, videos, and even sample libraries. However, we ultimately decided to focus on music for now, which is the highest priority. Our plan is eventually to expand the project to cover other types of stock media (we actually own a fair number of sound effects libraries on CD), once we have a decent number of albums covered. Of course, by then, this project will need to be renamed.
Of course, production music doesn't exist exclusively on CD. Before the advent of CDs, vinyl records were the standard for production music, and continued to be used for such music until around 1988-1990. While it is important for vinyl albums to be preserved, we believe that this is an entirely separate deal, and is outside the scope of our project, especially considering the following reasons:
Basically, it is very unlikely that PMCDAP will ever cover vinyl content, at least in the near future. That's not to say that it won't happen, though, but don't hold your breath.
As stated above, CDT files are included for whenever a CD has internal text, known as CD-Text. This specifies data such as the track title and artist information. Although it may seem redundant with the information on the CUE files for these albums which are also ripped with this text, it is still neccessary to have these files.
File hashes are "identifiers" generated by various cryptographic algorithms. It is unique for each file, so even if one byte of the file is altered, the file's hash can be completely different. MD5 and SHA1 are two different commonly used algorithms to calculate a hash. CRC, standing for "cycle redundancy check", is another algorithm used to detect errors in files. Basically, these are used to "verify" someone else's image of the discs by comparing their own generated hashes to those on the album's page in the database.
This means that the album has been submitted to the database, but its corresponding page hasn't been created yet (it is on queue or in progress). "TBA" stands for "to be announced", in case you're wondering.
The DAT file works the same way that DAT files from video game ROM preservation projects work; it lists every submission in the database and its associated files, along with all the hashes as well as the file size. This, as stated above, is used to "verify" that your files match those in the database. Currently, there aren't any programs available to process the database, but we hope to create tools in the future.
If you have production music CDs that you have confirmed are absent from the database (including missing alternate variants), or are interested in buying such CDs, go to the Contribute page. You'll find all you need there. Also, feel free to contribute if you have proper dumps of any of the CD images marked as "bad" or have better/missing image scans.
The PMCDAP project accepts any album that was released by a qualifying label as production music; i.e. an album that would be used by companies as production music. What we do not accept are commercial re-issues of any production music from non-library labels, examples being Music for TV Dinners or any of the KPM re-issue albums from Vocalion (example). That being said, there have been some albums that were available commercially but have also been released as production music, examples being many of the German label Sonia's albums (example). If you are unsure if your album is or isn't a "true" production music album, check the Lists tab; otherwise, you can search elsewhere or contact us at the email listed at the top of every page.
We also accept several types of CDs related to standard music albums, including demo/sampler CDs and interactive CD-ROMs featuring tools to find music from various libraries.
The only two real places that we know of that offer production music CDs for sale are eBay and Discogs, a music database website. The latter seems to be a better source; however, it is limited to items that have a page in their database, and they also have a policy against submitting albums that you do not own. Obviously, not every item is always available for sale. Another website that we can think of is CDandLP, but their selection seems to be much more limited, as they are more niche than the other two sites. If anyone knows of any other good sources for buying production music CDs, contact us.
We have a Discord server. It is available in the PMCDAP section of the following link: https://discord.gg/KXuGJnCX
This is a non-profit effort, and unfortunately, we do not accept donations for the time being.
This website does not host images of the CDs in the database. PMCDAP is a non-profit preservation project. It is not affiliated with any of the labels behind the media in the database.