How to get the best free 90s Jungle Samplepack and explore a treasure of free samples (and learn a bit of hacking on the way)

Wether you are an aspiring producer getting into the raw oldschool sound of classic Jungle in the 90’s, or wether you are like me, a seasoned pro-producer that has been to the raves yourself in the time and want to reconnect to that nostalgic feeling and want to give it a modern edge, perhaps with some Jump-Up D’nB Basslines.. You are in for a treat 🙂

As a nerdy fan of open-source, open-data, non-commercialism and a sweet tooth for the nostalgic of gone-by websites, I have always had a sweet spot for the internet archive.org.

The registered non-profit behind it “is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form”. Their mission is to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge. In 1996 they began by archiving the Internet itself, a medium that was just beginning to grow in use.
Today their archive contains:

• 916 billion web pages
• 49 million books and texts
• 10 million videos (including 3 million Television News programs)
• 5 million images
• 1 million software programs
• and, here comes the twist: 13 million audio recordings (including 268,000 live concerts)

Now in these audio recordings, there is a big treasure of professional Sample-CD’s that have been sold in the 90ies and are now freely downloadable from the archive. Some producers back in the day where even using these samples, but if not the better, you can make them your own sampling, pitching, delaying, reverberating and twisting them to entirely new sounds with the effects of your hearts desire, or whatever the track demands.

I have started watching production streams and tutorials more extensively in 2019, and a lot of new exciting shit, even from my favourite producers, has went live since then. I can not recommend enough getting inspired by other peoples workflows and production hacks.

Now you can find a lot of great samples and sounds here, be it old recordings (you can re-sample the classic jungle amen-break) or the sample CD’s I mentioned.

A particular library that I came upon in one of those streams , turned out to be strikingly iconic and probably not just for me:
The Zero-G Jungle Warfare Collection

Now, if you want to download it right away from the link there you will find that the number of requested files (13749) is too large for zip-on-the-fly.

So if you are by chance a programmer like me, the following will be trivial, but if you are not, well, take on your sunglasses my friend, we are entering the matrix.

Archive.org download script

Disclaimer: This tutorial is for Linux or MacOS users, I am not going to provide a Windows tutorial, sorry if you are still stuck with this spawn of hell.

We start low-key, but if you want you can use git and start from the beginning below.
Download: https://github.com/john-corcoran/internetarchive-downloader/archive/refs/heads/main.zip

Open up a Terminal, don’t worry, you’re save, I’ve got you. We are not going to delete your harddrive just yet, but if you want, we will delete a bunch of files later 🙂 Just type or copy-paste every line one after the other:

(propably you have git installed, then: 
git clone https://github.com/john-corcoran/internetarchive-downloader.git
), otherwise download manually above and continue here:
cd ~/Downloads/internetarchive-downloader-main
python3 -m venv venv    # We will create a virtual python environment to be save and not installing anything on your system, you can delete this env after you are done.
source venv/bin/activate     # Entering the env
pip install --upgrade pip    # Standard software package installer
pip install internetarchive   # Necessary library provided by archive.org (so cool!)
python3 ia_downloader.py download -i s1gblwhrecrsx3klphga -o Zero-G\ Jungle-Warfare\ Collection.   # Downloads all files to "Zero-G Jungle-Warfare Collection" in the same folder. You can change location and name here if you want.

Make sure you have 3,62GB of free space, because now the python script will download all files.

Here you go already my friend, let me hear what you created in the comments!

Now if you are savy on disk space like me, because you already have 200GB of sample libraries, here is a little script that you can use to delete all files but .wav or whatever you fancy, just change it. Since you are already safe in a python environment, lets create another python script.

touch keepwav.py  # create a new python script
vim keepwav.py    # open the file in vim editor (crazy nerdy, I know, I love it)
Press "i" in vim to enter writing mode.
Paste (CTRL/CMD+V) this code:
```
import os
import glob

folder_path = './'
extensions_to_keep = ['.wav'] 

for root, dirs, files in os.walk(folder_path):
    for file in files:
        file_path = os.path.join(root, file)
        if os.path.splitext(file)[1].lower() not in extensions_to_keep:
            try:
                os.remove(file_path)
            except PermissionError as e:
                print(f"Permission denied: {e}")
```

Press "Esc", ":wq", "Enter" to save the file and exit vim.

python3 keepwav.py    # Execute the new script to delete all files that have a different file ending than *.wav

You are welcome. If you want you can buy me a beer here.

Funny sidenote: I finished this article way before finishing the download 😀