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BBC Offers Beethoven Symphonies for Download
Simon80 writes "BBC Radio 3 is making performances by the BBC Philharmonic of Beethoven's 6th to 9th symphonies available for free download for the next few days only, as the second part of a trial to 'test listeners appetite for downloads'. During the first part, the first 5 symphonies were offered, and over 650,000 people downloaded them."
aren't there any "free classical performers" out there?
Yes. The problem is, they're not very good. Unlike popular music, where someone can start to learn guitar and become a world-famous "musician" a few years later (in some cases, this order is reversed), a good quality symphony orchestra contains 50 or more musicians, rarely with less than fifteen years of experience.
As a general rule, if you're a professional classical musician, you can't afford to give away your work for free -- not to mention the costs of renting a recording studio which can fit an entire symphony orchestra. If you're an amateur classical musician (defined as "has a full time job which isn't music"), then unless you're really exceptional, you're not good enough to make recordings which people will want to listen to.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
See for example Magnatune, which has tons of good classical recordings including some from world renowned performers, all under Creative Commons licenses. Granted they are mostly solo and small chamber performances, rather than full scale orchestral works. However, there are certainly professional classical performers willing and able to release stuff under CC. Note also that the BBC downloads are just a 7-day license and you're not allowed to share the files after downloading. It's not much better than a one-time radio broadcast that you can tape off the air.
Difference: As most people know, CBR uses a constant bitrate over the whole file (e.g. 128kbits/s).
VBR works with a constant QUALITY (or badness) setting and tries to guarantee that the quality won't degrade below a certain level by letting the bitrate float up and down as necessary. The advantage is that the bitrate is perfectly used up and does not waste precious bits on plain parts (e.g. silence) of a piece of music.
The problem is that there is no real scale for quality so arbitrary numbers get assigned (for the ogg-encoder 1-10). This let's people struggle over determining which quality is ``good enough''.
Another problem is that the target size of the file is not predictable. Usually it falls within certain limits but if the encoder struggles with a complex piece of music, the output file size can deviate considerably.
ABR is a compromise between the two, It let's the bitrate float but guarantees a specified AVERAGE bitrate. Thus it is more efficient than CBR (although not as efficient as VBR because it has to establish somewhat tighter control and has to let the quality drop if it threatens to exceed the average too much) but also predictable in the size of the resulting file, though not as precisely as CBR (though the deviation is very very slim in most cases). In almost all cases ABR is preferable to CBR if VBR isn't an option.
Heres something I found (either on slash itself, or from boingboing)
http://www.commontunes.org/beethovenssymphonies
its the 1st 5 as grabbed from the bbc
liqbase
In fact the length of an audio CD is related to the length of a video tape.
The sampling rate of 44.1 kHz is inherited from a method of converting digital audio into an analog video signal for storage on video tape, which was the most affordable way to store it at the time the CD specification was being developed. A device that turns an analog audio signal into PCM audio, which in turn is changed into an analog video signal is called a PCM adaptor. This technology could store 6 samples (3 samples per each stereo channel) in a single horizontal line. A standard NTSC video signal has 245 usable lines per field, and 59.94 fields a second, which works out at 44,056 samples/second. Similarly PAL has 294 lines and 50 fields, which gives 44,100 samples/second. This system could either store 14-bit samples with some error correction, or 16-bit samples with almost no error correction. There was a long debate over whether to use 14 or 16 bit samples and/or 44.056 k or 44.1 k samples/s when the Sony/Philips taskforce designed the compact disc; 16 bits and 44.1 k samples/s prevailed. The Sony PCM-1610 and PCM-1630 are well-known examples of PCM-adaptors used in conjunction with the Sony U-Matic VCR.
From
Here's a torrent for all nine
This is a tautology.