The site has some rough edges. Naming is not always clear and A and B sites are occasionally confused. The site contains also some texts in the Dutch language although you will find it easy to either ignore them or guess what they mean. But this doesn't take away that a lot of beautiful music can be found.
The site offers an option to register but that is not necessary.
When you arrive on the European Archive you will see something like the screen below:
The tracks left below are your final target. They are offered in many different formats. The VBR mp3s are about 128 kbps, the Ogg files about 68 kbps and the WAV files 705 kbps. For a 9 minutes 23 sec recording this resulted in the following file sizes: 64kbps mp3: 4.4MB; VBR mp3: 8.8MB; Ogg Vorbis: 4.7MB; FLAC: 23.4 MB; WAVE: 48.5MB. Please note that some formats may not have been declicked while others have.
Contents
In the middle of the page you find the contents of the lp. You should be aware that when the tracksnumbers are not
explicitly mentioned the order of the works here is sometimes not the order on the lp.
So you may have to look at the cover or the disk image to be more sure. In some rare cases not even that will be enough
- for example when the A and B sides seem mixed up - and you will have to trust your ears.
Cover images
When the main contents are lacking you can look at the cover images. The chance that you will find
on the front cover an overview of the locations is about as big as that you will find it on the back cover. Occasionally
neither will help or the cover may be missing (indicated with "No cover" images). In that case you will have to look at
the disc images.
Having the covers available has as an additional advantage that quite often the back cover contains some interesting texts about the works on the disk.
Disk images
On the disc images (click "jpg" below "record 1 side A") you can see how the disk looks like. The real image is
6 times as big as shown here and well readable.
Finally one note of caution: according to the conditions of European Archive the music on their site is only available for non-commercial use.