The NYA Experience
Please watch my Welcome Message located on the outside of the file cabinet for a personal tour of the site.
There are three distinct ways to explore my music on this site. Each… has its advantages.
1. You can view all songs organized chronologically in the file cabinet, giving you a list view of everything I have released—you will find some unreleased things in here, too…
2. To go a little deeper, you can view all recordings as an info card, sliding chronologically in either direction left to right, to listen and view detailed information about the recording of every song.
3. Lastly, the most comprehensive view is the timeline. Here you can view all of my albums on a chronological timeline, with touring information; relevant events in our lives, and my books, videos and films. The NYA timeline will also include galleries and videos-any content that might lie outside the scope of an album, film, video or particular recording.
My best advice is to simply explore the NYA on your own and find your own way through, much as you would in a physical archival library. But if you need some help, please watch my Welcome Message located on the outside of the file cabinet including a personal tour by me, or refer to the FAQ where you should find answers to many of your questions.
Also, continually check in at the NYA Times-Contrarian. This is where I will keep in touch with you.
Now, please go and explore the world’s first musician’s online archives ever!. I love listening to music this way. I can really hear it! There is no other way to hear and explore music in this audio quality anywhere in the world.
We developed the Neil Young Archives site to provide fans and music historians with unprecedented access to all of my music and to my entire archives in one convenient location. My team and I have spent years developing this site to make it both enjoyable and easy to use. The site allows me to share with the world the material I’ve spent a lifetime creating and collecting. I hope you enjoy it.
When you find a mistake, and if you look you probably will, please tell the archivist by sending a note on the contact page. NYA is a living document.
I would like to thank the many people who worked to bring NYA to fruition. (Credits are linked on the front of the file cabinet.)
Audio
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Listening to music has been one of the great joys of my life.
That said, today all music suffers from low quality audio throughout the distribution chain. It starts with big tech companies like Apple. Apple Music controls the audio quality that is served to the masses and chooses to not make high quality available, reducing audio quality to between 5% and 20% of the master I made in the studio in all cases. So, the people hear 5% to 20% of what I created.
Not just new music— All music.
Apple not offering a top-quality tier has led labels to stop making quality products available to the masses. Stimulating a top-quality tier would restore and bring the great classic recordings of all music history to Full Resolution digital like you find at NYA.
Apple was built on music. There is a great opportunity to rescue the art form that helped Apple become great.
Top quality digital music sounds amazing.
Today there is no convenient way for people to purchase and to enjoy the history of recorded sound and the magical recordings of the last century at their finest. As a result, top quality is now only available to elite, high-paying customers and there is a very limited amount of music titles to buy and equipment to use.
Given this opportunity music could support itself.
This is ironic because Apple’s new connector allows a recording’s raw data to be accessed directly from the iphone into a music playback device. This is a real breakthrough, finally allowing listeners the possibility of amazing digital audio. Now the cellphone can deliver.
This exciting new Apple iPhone capability can be utilized with top quality audio downloads. The ability for a consumer to get the most out of the pure music data and not be limited by a legacy cellphone’s compressed audio quality is truly a breakthrough for digital music.
The only problem is: top-quality audio recordings are not offered on Apple iTunes.
Why not allow the world to hear exactly what the artists have created?
Artists created this music for the people.
The technology exists for everyone to have the choice of top-quality audio. Let the people decide. It would be easy for music lovers to make a choice if top quality was offered by iTunes, rendering it obvious how good it sounds.
With control of an art form’s commerce comes some responsibility. Apple, while controlling the flow of music to the masses, has failed to be responsible.
That’s why it’s so important to me that my music be enjoyed here on this site at the highest possible digital quality, as close as possible to the way I recorded it. To accomplish this, all of my musical audio content at NYA is provided using Xstream by NYA adaptive audio technology streaming in Full Resolution.
In good conditions: Powerful computer, high bandwidth.
You can enjoy the absolute highest digital audio quality music listening. There is no better sounding digital than through Xstream by NYA. Your player window will be filled with green and a FULL RESOLUTION message will appear. This is a good opportunity to switch to 320 and listen for a bit, then go back to Master. That will show the difference.
In medium conditions: Powerful to mid-range computer, unsteady bandwidth.
Even if your music cannot be Full Resolution all the time because of your location conditions, you always get the best quality audio available at your location. You get everything that is in the air. All the time. That is what Xstream by NYA adaptive audio is all about. Xstream by NYA adaptive audio adjusts the music resolution in real time based on the conditions where you are listening. Your player window will be partially filled with green, rising and falling with the quality of your playback, and a FULL RESOLUTION message will possibly appear occasionally. That is the real world of bandwidth when you are on the edge.
In poor conditions: mid-range computer, low or erratic bandwidth
Sometimes, because the bandwidth is so low and/or your computer may not have the computing power to give you Full Resolution, your Xstream by NYA music may skip and buffer. Your player window will show very little green and be erratic.
In those conditions, to provide a reliable listening experience, we offer a toggle at the top of the window to switch between Xstream by NYA Full Resolution Master down to 320 kbps low resolution.
320 kbps is a recognized standard today, providing the same or better audio than most commercial streaming services. It is almost always consistent.
Your player window will show very little green at the bottom if the original master is high resolution, and the green will fill half the window if the original master is CD quality.
Green represents the percentage of the Master you are currently hearing.
To get the best performance and learn more about this technology, including commercially available equipment to add Xstream by NYA to your home stereo or headphones, we encourage you to read through the Audio Setup page, located in the global menu in the upper left corner.
Please remember that currently NYA sounds best from a computer. We will let you know when that advances. Our Audio section will be a BIG HELP there.
NYA is also available on tablets. To accommodate the streaming abilities of the hardware, audio is set at a standard streaming 320. You can experiment and switch to Master from 320 on the toggle switch.