Came across this site that is not expensive that does mp3 downloads from youtube at fast speed and will do whole playlists so I can eventually get some swing era shows.
Here for any interested is the site...
https://www.amoyshare.com/store/buy-anyutube.html
Good catch, Mark. I will check it out.
Any music is better than no music.
But I've always had reservations about using stuff downloaded from Youtube. Provenance is almost totally unknown.
Here are, imo, some better sources for jazz and swing music in particular.
1. Archive.org. They have tons of 78 rips from the original sources, and give far more info on the sources. Even some cylinder rips, although they would not likely be swing music
2. Various university digital music collections. Sorry I can't be more specific than that, you'd have to do the searches yourself, but many universities have digitized 78s (and cylinders)and made them available online. Access rights change all the time, probably due to legal issues, and I'm not up to date. I've used University of Santa Barbara in California, SLUB in Dresden and others, but haven't checked recently.
3. Usenet. Literally tons of material, the go to group is alt.binaries.sounds.78rpm-era, and much is in FLAC format (so the best you can get for dubious sources). You do, however, have to subscribe to a usenet service (newshosting is recommended) and get a usenet client (although newshosting provides you with a decent one which has search capabilities). You shouldn't have to pay more than a few dollars a month for usenet access, look around carefully if you go that route. Retention is the thing to look for (the number of days articles are kept in the database - the best have close to 6000 days or more, back to 2008).
4. Libraries. Many still have CD's and ripping them yourself guarantees that you'll get the quality you desire
Legalities are, of course, your responsibility. A lot of early jazz, including swing, is in the public domain in Canada. The recordings certainly are (as they were released prior to 1964, and have well passed the 50 year mark). Many of the composers have passed on to the great music hall in the sky as well, and if they did so prior to 1971, the stuff that they wrote is also in the public domain (copyright rule changes for composers were brought into effect in 2022 in Canada, extending the term from life plus 50 years to life plus 75+ years).
I'd stay away from torrents. If you don't know what you're doing, they're not anonymous (for that matter, unless you use a VPN, downloading anything from the web isn't anonymous). Many record companies still lay bogus copyright claims (at least in Canada) to music, and rather than get into arguments, it's better to avoid them.