I fucking love Codex! One of the things I love doing is downloading historical broadcasts, particularly from radio.
what I get sick of, though, is seeing the same recycled clips over and over again around the internet.
I used Codex to build an engine that basically will crawl through the Internet looking for downloadable MP3 files of different archival broadcasts, not only from English sources, but from other sources such as the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Norway, and Sweden to name a few.
These are particular areas where I don't have a great deal of broadcasts, particularly from the Second World War, but also other periods as well.
It won't download anything that's copy-restricted, but if the MP3s are there and even if they are in the languages of non-English archives, I have very carefully constructed the engine to get them.
It's quite a challenge because there is so much material available, but I put in some limits, for example, such as not getting news real audio because that is fairly easy to get, telling the engine that I only want broadcasts two minutes in length or above.
What also has become painfully apparent is that there is so much archival audio from many nations, especially Australia, that have not been digitised and put online.
Admittedly, funding constraints to digitise old hard to copy formats, copy restrictions, which I think are ridiculous after 80 years and the sheer volume can make it difficult, but I do think it's rather sad that it's only a fraction online of what is truly available.