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"How many businesses were successfully funded?"

Musopen for one was funded and is now able to hire professional orchestras to public domain music. Believe the original goal was 10k and they received 53k through kickstarter.

I thought one could download Free recordings of public domain music on a PC and then sync them to the iDevices using iTunes. When did Apple disable that?

There are certain lock-in aspects of the iDevices (particularly Apps) but the idea that you have to buy all of your media from the iTunes store is a complete myth.

iDevices can play MP3, unprotected AAC and MP4 video from any source, legal or otherwise. iTunes will happily rip your CDs (and there are third-party tools that will rip your DVDs into iDevice-friendly format) and the VLC media player was recently released for iOS. iBooks can read ePub and PDF, and there are several other reader Apps available.

You have to use the iTunes software - but not the iTunes store - to get the files onto the iPad but apart from that, the only lock-in is for Apps and firmware updates.

There are also various streaming apps - including YouTube. If the pirates aren't offering H.264 streams then complain to them, not Apple.

For example you cannot install pirate software on them, you cannot download [free] music

I thought one could download Free recordings of public domain music on a PC and then sync them to the iDevices using iTunes. When did Apple disable that?

It is essential to the people who will sell us our culture in the future that we forget all that has gone before. If we remembered our heritage it would be necesary to innovate new things. If we can't, then recycled things will suffice - which cuts down the production cost.

The goal therefore of the media giants is to make us nye culturne. A people devoid of culture. They're having great success at this.

An opposing project would be Musopen.

I recommend checking out the website of Musopen, the parent project, where they host all their existing public-domain performances. (As TFS says, they're currently working on recording symphonies; they already have many smaller-scale pieces like concertos and sonatas.) In particular, I'm really liking their streaming radio. You want an Internet radio station (1) to have access to a large selection of good music and (2) not to have excessive ads, a subscription fee, or some ridiculous DRM or custom client software. Every Internet radio station I've tried fails on at least one of these criteria: the amateur ones on #1 and commercial on #2 (and often #1 also). But all big library of uncopyrighted music seems to allow Musopen to achieve both. As long as you like classical music, it's basically perfect.

I recommend checking out the website of Musopen, the parent project, where they host all their existing public-domain performances. (As TFS says, they're currently working on recording symphonies; they already have many smaller-scale pieces like concertos and sonatas.) In particular, I'm really liking their streaming radio. You want an Internet radio station (1) to have access to a large selection of good music and (2) not to have excessive ads, a subscription fee, or some ridiculous DRM or custom client software. Every Internet radio station I've tried fails on at least one of these criteria: the amateur ones on #1 and commercial on #2 (and often #1 also). But all big library of uncopyrighted music seems to allow Musopen to achieve both. As long as you like classical music, it's basically perfect.

At 7:00 this morning, they were at $13K. Now, it's 11:00 and they are nearly at $23K, velocity is over $2,000 per hour right now, and there are over 50 hours remaining. Now that this is on slashdot, it's only a matter of time before it gets on digg, reddit, and becomes a twitternado.

If they raise $100K, that's starting to get into the range of reasonable contracts to have great orchestras record 26 symphonies with named-above-the-orchestra conductors. Even if Naxos has a kitten over this and starts to strong-arm, $100K will turn some heads.

Should you choose to part with three CDs worth of your hard earned money - $50 - that will get you a dvd of everything musopen has ever recorded in this way. Lossless. And if you have some doubts about the quality of their recordings, download a few before you give money. It's public domain, yeah?

I just have. The first one I listened
http://www.musopen.com/music.php?type=piece&id=107
is pretty awful. There may be one or two notes in tune, but I didn't spot them.

There's also the possibility that the orchestra believes in the cause and is offering their services at a cut rate - if anything, it would be more likely that the better (and presumably, therefore, relatively well paid in general) musicians would be willing and able to do such a thing.

In any case, their website has examples of music they've previously had recorded, so you can judge the quality for yourself.

Please consider supporting Musopen.

Classical music is worth so much that they give it away for free.

http://musopen.com/

Thankfully, classical .MP3s can be found for download in the public domain if you know how to phrase your search...