From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_Mix :

  The Essential Mix is a weekly radio show on BBC Radio 1 
  currently broadcast between 03:00 and 05:00 Saturday morning. 
  Originally broadcast on 30 October 1993, The Essential 
  Mix features contemporary DJs and music producers of
  electronic dance music.

For "open directories" like this, it's good form to use the Coral Cache in order to not overwhelm the original source: http://thenine.ca.nyud.net/essential/

Unfortunately, Coral Cache doesn't cache anything >50mb, so for almost all of these it'll just redirect you to the original URL. (There are a handful of <50mb mixes, which it does serve up without redirecting.)

Sadly I noticed that only later ;-) Though at least the cache could speed things up for the window shoppers.

Does anyone else have fond memories of the Oakenfold mixes?

http://thenine.ca/essential/2000/2000.02.13%20-%20Essential%...

http://thenine.ca/essential/2000/2000.05.21%20-%20Essential%...

Oakenfold's 'The Goa Mix' is probably the best mix I've ever heard.

Should be these two: http://thenine.ca.nyud.net/essential/1994/1994.12.18%20-%20E...

http://thenine.ca.nyud.net/essential/1994/1994.12.18%20-%20E...

Goa is good, but there's a lot more to Oakenfold than just that set (love his set from Havana Cuba). I have to say I'm happy to see fellow trance dinosaurs here. The electro world has moved on from the days of Oaky but I still have a vast collection that I use for marathon coding sessions.

So good it has its own Wikipedia entry - it's not often that a one-show playlist has been the template for a whole genre. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goa_Mix) Thanks for digging out the relevant links, mas I only had an incomplete copy of this.

Live in Rojan Club, Shanghai, China... And Liverpool University, those are all time faves!

I realise that other people's musical taste is not necessarily interesting, but http://thenine.ca/essential/1995/1995.11.11%20-%20Essential%... is what got me really into dance music, is what opened my ears to the musical possibilities of stringing records together, and made me think "I've got to learn how to do this".

I may regret posting this ....

But this is what you probably want to do:

user@host:/path/to/EssentialMixRip09.04.10$ wget -rl 0 -np -A .mp3 http://thenine.ca/essential/

As a heads up for anyone who doesn't realize how much music this is, that wget will slurp >100gb of stuff (or would, if it weren't for sever load).

Using Coral CDN:

  wget -rl 0 -np -A .mp3 http://thenine.ca.nyud.net/essential/

Nogood, checkout the robots.txt

Since Coral considers itself a distributed caching proxy rather than a crawler, it doesn't respect robots.txt. It does respect the relevant cache-control headers, like "no-cache", but this site doesn't appear to set them.

However, the main problem here is that Coral doesn't cache any files >50mb, so almost none of these are cached. The few <50mb do seem to be, though, e.g.: http://thenine.ca.nyud.net/essential/1998/1998.01.01%20-%20E...

Yup, thenine.ca is blocking coral cache for .mp3 :(

-e robots=off

However aren't they copyrighted?!

Or install extension.fm :)

Does anyone have a torrent link to download these, or does getting music in bulk through a torrent feel too illegal in ways that grabbing individual tracks from a directory listing doesn't?

They are in a 110 Gigabyte torrent at themixingbowl, a site dedicated to mixes. I also highly recommend the BTTB series.

Good tip. Thanks.

I recommend the Scratch Perverts mix at: http://thenine.ca/essential/2004/2004.08.22%20-%20Essential%...

seconded, that's a fantastic mix.

I've waited 15 years for this link. Thank you.

My personal favourite, from 1997: http://thenine.ca/essential/1997/1997.03.02%20-%20Essential%...

This is an epic one.

Surprising to see this on HN. Regardless, here's my favs:

2009-03-10 Jamie Jones, 2007-02-18 Danny Howells, 2006-10-14 Trentemoller, 2003-08-24 Sasha live at Creamfields

Aren't these copyrighted?

My initial reaction was "WTF is that doing on HN?":

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_Mix:

"However in 2010, Mixriot, a website which hosted stream and download links to past Essential Mix broadcasts dating back to the first ever edition for its members, was asked to remove all its past recordings by production company Somethin' Else due to copyright infringement. The Mixriot website is still live though it has since taken down all Essential Mix broadcasts."

I would expect the owner of that site to be getting a nasty letter from a lawyer Real Soon Now.

I guess some "Hackers" think that copyright law is for other people to obey.

Been waiting a while for something like this, could anyone identify either this track or the set it's from? I know it's from Cor Fijneman's Outstanding Radio mix...

http://lorinhalpert.com/puredj-Cor_Fijneman-Outstanding Radio.mp3

Awesome! I usually download three or four of these a year from the DJs I like.

And Yes! I'm glad this came to HN, otherwise I wouldn't find it and I love the Essential Mixes.

From 2010 I recommend the one from John 00 Fleming at 13-FEB-2010.

You sir are a god amongst men. Wasn't aware that so many HN readers were into house, techno, trance, etc.

Anyone ever been to Ultra Music Festival? Most amazing time of my life.

I've got a fairly good collection of the older mixes, and there's some amazing stuff in there, no doubt. Any pointers on what's been really great in the last couple of years?

Extra info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Essential_Mix_episodes

Oh wow, overload. Tempted to leach, but...

Anyway, here is a recommendation:

2006.03.26 - This is a good long mix I listened to many times.

Oh my god I want this so bad but the server load is ridiculous. If someone could download it and put it on a torrent I'd love you so much.

The server may get more load than it can stand.

It seems to be down now, for me.

this was epic http://thenine.ca/essential/1994/1994.05.28%20-%20Essential%... as well as the daft punk one posted earlier here.

Not to be gauche, but where do I send the 1TB hard drive to get a dump of every mix? :D

seems like the site was overloaded and exceeded bandwidth capacity

Wish these were hosted on mixcloud.com

paul oakenfold 18.12.1994 goa mix :ave

edit: i don't get it, why downvotes ?

Really? Really? Come on, keep this on Reddit please.

I apologize. Justification for posting:

1. As a time portal showing the evolutionary development of electronic music over the past 17 years, it also a reflection of the evolution of personal computing. From atari and circuit bending roland synths to the macbook.

2. Music is an important part of my coding or designing process.

No apology necessary - this is an awesome find. Essential mixes are probably my most listened to programming tracks.

Coding music is a common theme on HN.

Most recently 48 days ago (which has links to many others): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1525445

An occasional single post that contains a multitude of links is one thing.

Encouraging people to make each of those links (and others like them) a separate post is another.

I might be misunderstanding you, but surely there must be a line between encouraging people and telling them to go to other sites.

" ... but surely there must be a line between encouraging people and telling them to go to other sites."

There's certainly some sort of misunderstanding going on, because now I have no idea what that is supposed to mean or refer to.

My original intended point:

I do not want to see more posts such as "Every BBC Essential Mix, 1993 to 2010". When they do appear, I prefer people not up-vote them; it just encourages more of the same.

I do, however, like certain posts that accumulate a multitude of links to a variety of music sources. And it was a post of that kind that was (incorrectly) presented as some sort of precedence for the current post.

In any event, these things will sort themselves out as people prefer.

There is no "I" in community.

Yes there is.

Okay, you can take your comment to Reddit. I know complaining HN is turning into Reddit is a very catchy meme, but it has still, as of yet, to turn into Reddit and as music is a frequent topic on HN this is worthy of note. If you don't agree, either don't upvote, don't make a HN=Reddit complaint, or go to Reddit for 5 minutes and return in horror and feel strangely comfortable again on HN.

but i don't read reddit anymore.

What's a reddit?!

Wow, tough crowd.