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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 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.
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and not just music.
would be J.S.Bach. Over 1000 works.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
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
I hope they don't forget anything from their Chopin list.
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
API for Chopin actually. And it will be if we make it :)
It'll be structured data:
listing of all his music with composition dates
links from each recording to his sheet music
list of major events in his life
wikipedia and liner notes about each piece
geographical information related to the music or events in his life
etc.
So people can try to do various things, node map, timelines. We have some of our own ideas we'd like to try.
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.
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.
Fuck - just gimme 320kbps MP3 and I'll be happy....
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
OK, so this is not actually quite right:
The answer: Our -96dB noise floor figure is effectively wrong; we're using an inappropriate definition of dynamic range. (6*bits)dB gives us the RMS noise of the entire broadband signal, but each hair cell in the ear is sensitive to only a narrow fraction of the total bandwidth. As each hair cell hears only a fraction of the total noise floor energy, the noise floor at that hair cell will be much lower than the broadband figure of -96dB.
Thus, 16 bit audio can go considerably deeper than 96dB. With use of shaped dither, which moves quantization noise energy into frequencies where it's harder to hear, the effective dynamic range of 16 bit audio reaches 120dB in practice... (source)
So there's rather more headroom (by about 20 dB) than I say.
However, even that link has this to say:
Professionals use 24 bit samples in recording and production [14] for headroom, noise floor, and convenience reasons.
16 bits is enough to span the real hearing range with room to spare. It does not span the entire possible signal range of audio equipment. The primary reason to use 24 bits when recording is to prevent mistakes; rather than being careful to center 16 bit recording-- risking clipping if you guess too high and adding noise if you guess too low-- 24 bits allows an operator to set an approximate level and not worry too much about it. Missing the optimal gain setting by a few bits has no consequences, and effects that dynamically compress the recorded range have a deep floor to work with.
An engineer also requires more than 16 bits during mixing and mastering. Modern work flows may involve literally thousands of effects and operations. The quantization noise and noise floor of a 16 bit sample may be undetectable during playback, but multiplying that noise by a few thousand times eventually becomes noticeable. 24 bits keeps the accumulated noise at a very low level. Once the music is ready to distribute, there's no reason to keep more than 16 bits.
so my overall point -- 16 bits is enough for the end user but not very good for mastering -- holds.