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New Musopen Campaign Wants To "Set Chopin Free"
Eloquence writes "Three years ago, Musopen raised nearly $70,000 to create public domain recordings of works by Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, Schubert, and others. Now they're running a new campaign with a simple but ambitious objective: 'To preserve indefinitely and without question everything Chopin created. To release his music for free, both in 1080p video and 24 bit 192kHz audio. This is roughly 245 pieces.'" Adds project organizer aarondunn:
"His music will be made available via an API powered by Musopen so anyone can come up with ways to explore and present Chopin's life."
They are going to release things at a sampling rate that makes a bunch of wackos go nuts because it "loses so much". I'm getting my popcorn ready.
They found an old trunk belonging to George Sand and in it were several Blu-ray disks she made of Chopin performing his career works. Awesome find!
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
But this isn't just an end user format! The idea is to set this music free so that it can be used in other projects, remixed, remastered, anything.
But this isn't just an end user format! The idea is to set this music free so that it can be used in other projects, remixed, remastered, anything.
Here come the Chopin Dubstep remixes....
I disagree. It will cause fewer problems when having to resample. For example, usually DVDs and blu-rays require a 48KHz sampling rate. The additional bits and bitrate are also useful when mixing or processing the audio later for those who choose to do so.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
I know you're trolling, but everyone else can relax. Chopin's not exactly a long-form kind of guy. The Ramones of Romanticism, if you will. It'll all still fit on a couple-hundred CDs. Or a couple big USB sticks if you want to go all 21st century on it. It'll be OK. No one's actually gonna be forced to download it if they don't want to.
I am not a crackpot.
and not just music.
To preserve indefinitely and without question everything Chopin created
There is always the question of interpretations of an individual. That is the way it should be, or the musicians would be eventually be replaced with post-musical-singularity programs.
No need to go crazy about lossy compression. I may just have to donate to this one.
Besides the fact that 24bit 192kHz audio is retarded audiophile snakeoil and provides zero audio quality improvement over 16bit 44.1kHz as a end user format this is a good idea.
Wrong.
There's some research suggesting that humans can hear transient sounds with frequency components theoretically beyond the normally recognized 20kHz or so "audible" limit.
Now if I could just find it - my Google-fu is weak and all I get are audiophile regurgitation of that. :-(
would be J.S.Bach. Over 1000 works.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
We're also going to offer standard CD formats, so no need to worry. If we raise enough money that is.
Thanks for all the comments and for those that have backed us. I'll be here if anyone has any questions/comments they'd like answered. -Aaron
One of my favorites: Valse Brillante in A Minor.
I hope they don't forget anything from their Chopin list.
Let me know how wonderful your 3rd string pianist sounds. I will stick with real artists that I don't mind paying a few dollars to support.
musopen seems really great until you download 5 songs and then they want you to pay. blurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp
It's called "mp3". An API for music isn't a thing.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
24-bit makes sense, giving far greater dynamic range (which can be construed as resolution if we want to compare it to photos/videos). Admittedly, calling it 24-bit is a bit absurd as the best I've heard of is closer to 20, maybe 21 bit, but if we're trying to keep within a standardized system, may as well use groups of 8. In older recording/playback system 48k was a vast improvement over 44.1k. The perceived advantages to 88.2k, 96k, 176.4k, and 192k were due to a one octave (88.1k/96k) or two octave (176.4k/192k) low pass filter causing less of a high frequency bump than a tenth of an octave (44.1k) or an eighth of an octave (48k). This is not really necessary anymore as the digital filters perform way better than most people give them credit for.
As a playback standard, 24-bit 44.1k or 24-bit 48k make perfect sense with current generation, decent quality D/A. 24-bit permits the greater dynamic range and greater dynamic accuracy that pieces like Chopin's can benefit from. There likely will be an audible sonic difference between 44.1k and 192k, but it will be distortion. Some people certainly prefer the sound of these higher bit rates, however it is still not accurate to the original product. If the higher resolution bit depth isn't necessary (as is the case with most modern music) it will not be detrimental to the playback, unlike 192k.
For anyone looking for a more in depth write up, it was shared here on /. a while back, but there's a great write-up from Neil Young about why these formats don't matter (the argument using solely a 1k test tone is very easy to dither, using a full symphony or even a full piano's range is virtually impossible to mask with dither). I disagree with him in general on the 16-bit vs 24-bit, but, for the most part, the average listener would never know the difference considering the dynamic range in most modern music is still comparable to watching a movie that's 128 x 72 upconverted to 1080p while 1080p would've been available to the producer to begin with.
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
I just clicked on the archive.org page for this and they have full multitracks in wav format for each. . . Very nice.
There are many reasons why 44.1KHz or 48KHz 16bit music is mastered at much higher quality, even if you never see those masters. Musopen is simply making those masters available.
You can then derive 48KHz 16bit or whatever you please from those masters, or just download such files which Musopen will also make available to you.
This is especially true for a single instrument, like a solo piano. I'd love to have the rig that Steinway put together to be able to differentiate between recordings of New York vice Hamburg D's. It's pretty easy to do in person by most people who play Chopin's corpus, much less so in a recording.
It has everything to do with harmonics. At CD sampling rates a 15 kHz sine wave is indistinguishable from a 15 kHz sawtooth wave -- you only have three samples per crest. Whether or not a human ear could discern the difference has afaik not been studied.
Free Martian Whores!
> remixed
If you are going to remix it then up mix it to 192kHz before you start hacking on it. It's not like you are actually ever going to improve the audio quality by mixing it with other stuff.
> remastered
To remaster you kinda of have to have the original recordings. You'll never be able to pull audio out of recordings you downloaded from this project that doesn't exist no matter what 'kHz' pcm format it is encoded at.
Indeed, we're talking Chopin here, not Kidd Rock. With classical music you need dynamic range. With other classical composers you need even more; the 1812 overture comes to mind. I'm not sure 24 bit would be high enough, provided you had some REALLY big amplifiers in your stereo. I mean, cannons are a lot louder than drums.
Free Martian Whores!
Your problem is that you suffer from 'authoratative belief'. Unless you have the auditory senses of a newborn baby, you won't, and noone else can despite their claims, be able to tell the difference between a 192Kbit MP3 and any source material of a higher bit rate in a true ABX test that is rendered from the same source mix. Even Ivor Tiefenbrun, the most vocal anti-digital audio advocate, was proven wrong nearly thirty years ago. You might want to start your Google-fuing here:
http://www.bostonaudiosociety.org/bas_speaker/abx_testing2.htm
and try to gain an understanding why 24/192 audio is a waste of time unless you are mastering a CD:
http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html
"At CD sampling rates a 15 kHz sine wave is indistinguishable from a 15 kHz sawtooth wave"
Can you please learn math and signal processing properly before you spew that level of utter crap?
At CD sampling rates (44.1kHz), you will have perfect reconstruction of any waveform that is bandwidth-limited at ~22 kHz if you have infinite precision (i.e. no quantization errors due to limited bits-per-sample).
192kHz is TOO MUCH, and it will actually degrade the reproduction quality if it is fed to anything that doesn't neutralize the damage by applying a low-pass filter to get rid of all the ultrasonics and aliasing before it hits the analog stage.
24 bits might actually be useful for extra dynamic range, but only if the final encoding pass is not being done properly.
Don't confuse the formats required for signal processing (where 24 bits and 96kHz are indeed useful), or the oversampling done *internally* by the DACs to implement a much larger gap for their *internal* low-pass filter to operate, with the formats appropriate for the final work (where anything more than 24bit 48kHz is idiotic, and 16bit 48kHz should have been enough).
Please refer to:
http://xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html
The above was written by one of the engineers behind FLAC itself.
READ IT. It will teach you exactly what you need to know about sampling theory and signal processing for you to not look like an utter ignorant, math-challenged buffon every time you start talking about bits-per-sample and sampling frequencies. It will also teach enough about the human hearing for you to understand what is really required *in practice* for good-enough-even-for-SuperMozart signal fidelity reproduction.
Might want to start expanding on those stretch goals. I don't think you will have any trouble getting there. After the awesome job you did on the first set people should be eager to help out again. It did seem to take forever though.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
At CD sampling rates a 15 kHz sine wave is indistinguishable from a 15 kHz sawtooth wave
At CD sampling rates (44.1kHz), you will have perfect reconstruction of any waveform that is bandwidth-limited at ~22 kHz if you have infinite precision (i.e. no quantization errors due to limited bits-per-sample).
I think grandparent's point is that once you've bandwidth-limited your signal to 22 kHz, a 15 kHz sawtooth wave becomes a 15 kHz sine wave.
One solution here is to use some form of companding. Apply "loudness war" style level compression to the audio stored on the CD and in the FLAC, but store in a side channel the compression level at the start of each CD sector (1/75 of a second) so that the original dynamic range can be reconstructed. I was under the impression that one of the modes of HDCD worked this way.
Paying to be in the movie, rather than being paid for acting, smacks of prohibited prostitution.
All you've done here is prove you don't know shit about recording. 24bit 192khz audio would be ridiculous for a production copy but is relatively mediocre for a studio master.
The most layman example I can provide is: imagine if you wanted to record a movie in 1080p... and you record the last critical sceen in 1080p but realize you want to zoom in on the hero at the last minuite... you can't... the recording is in the same format as the release. To zoom in digitally you would lose quality. However, if you recorded the entire movie in a much higher format... and there you go. So to master a release, you record in much much higher quality. Well beyond what the human ear can hear. Then you master it down to what you want to release. In video its more obvious why you need it but in audio it's usually related to specific effects like pitch shifters and such. Pitch shifting a low quality recording sounds awful.
Slow it down for a bassline and that 192KHz will actually be useful.
It all depends on the source material.
The thing is, that might actually be interesting.
But this isn't just an end user format! The idea is to set this music free so that it can be used in other projects, remixed, remastered, anything.
Here come the Chopin Dubstep remixes....
I guess you never heard the Apotheosis remix of Carl Orff's O'Fortuna.
I freely downloaded a set of Bach organ works that were donated to the public domain, and they're a treasured part of my extensive collection. It's unfortunate in a sense that top grade recording interests such as the Vienna Philharmonic will endure a reduction of their royalties, but the main repertoire of classical music has been out of copyright in some cases for centuries, and I applaud this direction.
Fuck - just gimme 320kbps MP3 and I'll be happy....
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Tracks 1,4,5 and 10...
If you are going to remix it then up mix it to 192kHz before you start hacking on it.
You'll never be able to pull audio out of recordings you downloaded from this project that doesn't exist
It's amazing you managed to write both of those sentences in the same post.
Dropping from 192 KHz to 44.1 destroys information that you can never get back. It's not information that can be used if you just listen to it, but it is information that can be used if you pass it through more editing stages.
You "disagree with him"? All the way through your post you've shown no understanding of the very things addressed by Monty in this article, and then at the end you think the article is by Neil Young when it's actually criticising releases by Neil Young.
Basically you have no reading comprehension.
192Lhz sounds like ass if the clown that compressed it didnt have a clue
heck 44.1Khz isnt even worth listening to anymore as its all overdriven and clipped
you are confused, 192 is not a samplerate, its a bitrate a 44.1Khz recording is more around 700kbs (16 bits *44100 times a second)
so n 192 is quite pathetic compared to basic 1980's tech pressed on plastic
Mod that up... it's a good explanation.
I'm convinced that 44.1/16 is beyond human hearing ability in realistic scenarios... but it's only a little beyond it. It leaves very little wiggle room for doing any processing.
Or even just recording. 16 bits actually records slightly less than the human ear can distinguish in really ideal conditions. Those conditions are pretty much "you're in a soundproofed room" with essentially no ambient noise, but that doesn't leave a lot of room to "a good listening environment". So if you're recording in 16 bits, now you've got to worry about setting the input volume almost perfectly, so that you've captured the quiet parts but never clip. Clip? That'll be audible in even mediocre conditions unless you make up stuff. Record volume 10 or 15 dB too low? Probably careful listeners in a good but realistic environment could tell. With 24 bits? Now you've got a ton of wiggle room.
There's an online group called the "Piano Society" - pianosociety.com that shares performances - free to anyone who wants to listen or watch. Over 5k recordings online already. Lots of Chopin, many top notch performers.
Why re-invent the wheel? Also youtube.
HELLO McFLY!!! Public Domain?!?! mastering new versions. KNOCK KNOCK! ANYONE HOME!
No you are the one is confused, when someone says 24bit/192kHz they mean the 192kHz as a sample rate. High end audio gear usually offers this sample rate though it's doubtful if there is any benefit. 96kHz is probablly more than sufficiant in practice.
That 192 kilobit per second is also a bitrate used for crappy compress
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
I wish I hadn't. Utter shite.
If I want to listen to classical pieces that have been fucked around with there's ELP and Tomita.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
At CD sampling rates (44.1kHz), you will have perfect reconstruction of any waveform that is bandwidth-limited at ~22 kHz
And a 15kHz sawtooth wave is certainly not a waveform that is "bandwidth limited at ~22kHz"
In real life the signals entering your system from the real world are NOT sharply bandwidth limited so you have to bandwidth limit them to avoid aliasing. There are two ways of doing this, the first is to use an aggressive a analogue filter and then sample at the rate you actually finally want. The other is to use a much less agressive analogy filter, sample at a higher sample rate and then filter and decimate the signal digitally.
Either way you will create artifacts. In particular there is a tradeoff that the more perfect a filter is in the frequency domain the more ringing it creates in the time domain.
Or if you don't care about data rate you could just stay in the higher sample rate throughout the system and avoid the need for agressive filters at all.
If your system had perfect filters then putting a 15kHz sawtooth wave in would result in a 15kHz sinewave out. Of course perfect filters can't exist so in reality you will also get a small ammount of alised signal in there too.
Does any of this matter to the human ear? that is for the audiophiles to argue over ;)
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Sorry I forgot to complete the last sentance.
That 192 kilobit per second is also a bitrate widely used for crappy compressed audio is merely a coincidence and unrelated to the topic at hand.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
I liked his crunk stylings, but his efforts at dubstep weren't to my taste ...
I hadn't thought about that track for at least 15 years until you mentioned it just now.
Those were a good 15 years.
My problem is that I tend to not be so interested in the heavyweights, I much prefer lesser known composers, such as Chopins contemporary, Karol Szymanowski.
In any case, Chopin composed numerous highly patriotic songs (as in music which is sung) as well as folk songs which aren't explored much, and devilishly hard to get good recordings of. Musically good versions of those should be worth it.
Speaking of Chopin set free, who has played Frédéric: The Resurrection of Music?
Utter shite.
It wasn't that good. Closer to the festering diseased shite category, except that most festering diseased shite would take the comparison as an insult.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
The Ramones? No.
The Steve Vai/Engvey Mausteen of Romanticism, plus very naughty bits.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
"To preserve indefinitely and without question everything Chopin created."
This indefinite preservation technology is actually known as a musical score. It's the technology Chopin used, and it's a pretty good preservation system, with infinitely high resolution, flexibility and scalability. Admittedly it's more ambitious but it's ultimately a more future-proof project to teach music literacy ... and it has a far simpler interface that's been out of beta for a couple of centuries.
Dennis
http://maltedmedia.com/bathory/
The main use will probably be in other things that are free. Such as wikipedia, and preloaded on OLPCs (which actually has happened to Musopen's music). If you're making dubstep commercially, it would cost you very little to get a Chopin recording you could sample anyway, so no change expected there.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Isn't Liszt the Steve Vai of Romanticism?
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.