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."

Comments

It was me!

[garglebutt]

I invested in this. Great idea to set music free. Enjoy the downloads.

Re:It was me!

[Dr_Barnowl]

I think the main reason he's doing it is because Microsoft became really boring.

Operating Systems? Meh. Office? Meh.

What, in the world of pure software, is going to make a real difference in peoples lives (not just a marginal difference)? Or a real difference to his bank balance?

if I was even 1 / 10,000th as rich as Bill Gates (a respectable $6,000,000 dollars) I wouldn't be wasting my time trying to gild my corporate cage a bit more ; I'd be working on problems that interest me.

Re:It was me!

[aztracker1]

How do you figure... giving 100,000 of income to charity is at most a tax break of 50,000 or so.... would 100,000 not be more than the 50,000 in taxes? I always hate arguments like this.... donations are not 1:1 deductible from taxes.

Re:It was me!

[Anonymous Coward]

"Their attitude is that the musicians (and by extension, all content creators) should create art/music/films/games/etc. for the benefit of the rest of the rest of us as a hobby "

Not at all. We want them to get paid _once_ for their work, just like the rest of us.
You don't pay the builders, painters, cleaners of your house every time you use it, why should you pay for the background music there?

Nicely done!

[symbolset]

Fantastic. Now let's do it again until more classical works are liberated. And visit their "donate" button.

Re:Nicely done!

[CrashandDie]

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.

Re:Nicely done!

[Anonymous Coward]

the ones they recorded are performed by "Musopen Symphony Orchestra"

everything else on their site is a crapshoot from other sources.

Re:Nicely done!

[Swistak]

wav is not only losless format. Files are distrubuted also in m4f and flac ( http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/7536456/2012_Musopen_Kickstarter_Project_%5BFLAC%5D ) Quality of recordings done by kickstarter campaign is excellent. And there was poll amongst backers what to do with money. I as one of backers (overwheliming majority) decided we want to have more music with good quality, then one or two tracks with perfect quality. If you want perfect recording from best orchestra in the world, go and buy it on dvd.

Re:There's Sheet Music, and Sheet Music

[symbolset]

The composition has to be a relatively ancient edit to qualify for public domain status in the performed work.

At the bottom you will see the option to filter by composer.

And of course you're welcome to repeat the effort if this one doesn't suit your standard. In the meantime the rest of us will set about setting our slideshows, presentations, home movies and youtube clips to this public domain classical music.

Re:There's Sheet Music, and Sheet Music

[maxwell demon]

It's weird that the article doesn't link to the Homepage of the project or at least to the main music browsing page which features, besides others, a list of composers to select from.

Re:Completed? That's a bit of a laugh

[anom]

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

Re:There's Sheet Music, and Sheet Music

[Vintermann]

The Beethoven's fifth you linked to is performed by a small town college orchestra, not the Musopen Symphony Orchestra (really the Czech National Symphony Orchestra, but I don't know if Musopen are allowed to say that in advertising!). Anyone can contribute to Musopen - you'll even find midi keyboard renditions there. It's better than nothing, is Musopen's philosophy.

During the Kickstarter, Aaron Dunn wrote to us and we discussed extensively whether we should get a few works by a "big name" orchestra, or several from a less-known one. We did blind listening tests, too.

You still have the option to pay money to hear Bernstein's interpretations. In fact, you probably will always have to pay money to hear Bernstein's interpretations, the way copyrights are being extended... but now you also have the option of hearing some solid renditions of Brahms symphonies by a professional Czech orchestra, for free. For ever.