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Project To Turn Classical Scores Into Copyright-Free Music Completed
yourlord writes "Just under two years ago Musopen launched a Kickstarter campaign covered here on Slashdot. Today that project is complete with the release of a large amount of classical recordings into the public domain. This brings an extensive collection of high quality classical music into the public domain. The project music is hosted on the Musopen site, and on archive.org."
The great weakness with this is that the value of sheet music is in the edition. Just as books benefit from a good editor, so does music.
My girlfriend has a music degree, and is an accomplished teacher of piano. She pulls her hair out whenever a student shows up with something downloaded from the Internet, or even worse, one of those oddball cheap Chinese editions. How the music is edited really does affect how it is played.
Aside from that, it's weird that the music listings aren't by composer. Do these folks not know how many "String Quartets in C major" have been written?
Three Squirrels
Unfortunately, Musopen provided the content in Apple lossless format instead of a widely used, open, non-patent-encumbered format such as FLAC. Plus, the official torrent contains a single gigantic zip file.
There is a torrent containing all 145 separate tracks in FLAC format here:
http://pirateproxy.net/torrent/7536456/2012_Musopen_Kickstarter_Project_[FLAC]
the torrent link is: http://archive.org/download/musopen-lossless-dvd/musopen-lossless-dvd_archive.torrent
And visit their "donate" button.
FTFY (rationale: I read some comments indicating some have difficulties in finding their way on the site).
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Indeed. I remember the kickstart project and all, and how the project went from "With a few grand we can do this" to "Oh wow, we've got 7 times what we asked for, let's do more".
I don't think they should've done more than they originally set out, they should've increased the planned quality. What I mean by that is that it is likely the initial budget they asked for was way too low, anyway, for what they wanted to do.
Indeed, the quality of the recordings is poor, at best, and there are a great number of mistakes in the performances. Yet none of those care, because for maybe one of the first times, there are actual, recent recordings in the public domains. But coughing? Seriously?
Anyway, I'd like for MusOpen to take this chance to also distribute the works in the raw format they have, or .wav, or any other kind of lossless format, preferably not encumbered by patents or licensing issues. I'll even go ahead and offer a lot of bandwidth to help MusOpen achieve that goal.
Yet none of those care, because for maybe one of the first times, there are actual, recent recordings in the public domains. But coughing? Seriously?
Seriously.. 1st movement, after playing begins.. a cough...
Apparently its someones recital.. sounds like a tape player is used to record it.. where you can even hear the noise of the spinning tape...
"His name was James Damore."
From my understanding the moonlight sonata wasn't even one of the pieces performed by the orchestra in the kickstarter campaign? It isn't listed at any of the links in the article. Musopen compiles a bunch of different music from many sources and so some if it is complete crap, but my impression was that the point of this project was to get some better recordings of a select group of pieces.
the ones they recorded are performed by "Musopen Symphony Orchestra"
everything else on their site is a crapshoot from other sources.
A number of people seem to be confusing the overall musopen library with the recently completed project.
Musopen has been around for some time collecting non-copyrighted performances of various classic works from whatever source was available. For example, you'll note from the musopen page that the Pictures at an Exhibition was performed by the Skidmore College Orchestra.
The Kickstarter project musopen undertook was to professionally record a few of the classics. On the Musopen site, you'll see "Musopen Symphony Orchestra" listed as the performer -- those pieces are listed here: http://musopen.org/music/by/performer/Musopen-Symphony-Orchestra
http://www.blockmrecords.org/bach/ Played by James Kibbie, and as a quote from the website: "This project is sponsored by the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance, with generous support from Dr. Barbara Furin Sloat in honor of J. Barry Sloat, and with additional support from the Office of Vice-President for Research, the University of Michigan."
You do realize that the orchestral performers are still artists, right?
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
No, he's doing it because it allows him to push IP treaties onto countries with growing economies and emerging markets that benefit his other investments.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Yet another poster who has not understood what Musopen does or what this Kickstarter was. Pictures at an Exhibition was not recorded as part of this project. In fact it was freely contributed to Musopen by an amateur orchestra.
Didn't it tip you off that a lot of the music on Musopen actually are midi performances? Anyone can contribute!
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Sound editors aren't magic, you can't take a bad performance and make it great, and you can't edit out systemic noise like wow and flutter from a tape. You also can't edit out a sound from under another sound, without major audible artifacts.
What a big label would do is go and use better quality equipment to record the track. It isn't even that expensive these days. Then they would record multiple takes as necessary and edit those together.
Hell forget big labels, this is what a university recording studio would do. It is not too much to ask that if the idea is to get "open" replacements to professional music that a professional job of it is done.
I'd like to add that the Musopen Symphony Orchestra is, in essence, the Czech National Sympony Orchestra. They're a very solid commercial symphony orchestra (i.e, mostly playing for films and commissioned concerts, as opposed to being attached to an institution or subscription program).
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MusOpen is for music recordings, not sheet music.
No.
Musopen provides sheet music and recordings.
IMSLP provides sheet music and recordings.
From the database size it seems that IMSLP has more sheet music and more recordings than Musopen.
From a IMSLP board message http://imslpforums.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=840 I conclude that Musopen was founded in a response to a temporary shutdown of IMSLP for almost a year in 2007. When IMSLP re-opened, Musopen didn't shutdown but continued their own platform.
Not quite, those which are recorded as "Musopen String Quartet" are also from this effort.
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Aaron here, founder of Musopen. I think you would be hard pressed to find any evidence that Musopen, or really any free online music service (spotify, itunes, rdio etc) is hurting symphonies. If there is a decline in attendance its because of a chance in musical tastes, not mp3s shared on the internet. I know from personal experience that I only became interested in classical music when a CD was shared with me (illegally!) and I began searching out more on my own. I now attend concerts because nothing will ever match the quality of the sound, or the experience hearing it live. I know that for a fact because I've spent way to much on my stereo system.