New Musopen Campaign Wants To "Set Chopin Free" 142
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."
Re:Going to waste bandwidth on useless audio forma (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Aaron (founder of Musopen) any ? I can answer? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:More ambitious (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Every piece ever? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Going to waste bandwidth on useless audio forma (Score:5, Informative)
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 [xiph.org] 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.
Re:API? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:More ambitious (Score:2, Informative)
You may be interested in this:
http://www.opengoldbergvariations.org/
Kimiko Ishizaka gives a wonderful interpretation (However, Keith Jarret's interpretation is still one of the finest harpsichord interpretations of this work.) especially the Aria. These recordings bring a stunning realism to these works.
Re:Aaron (founder of Musopen) any ? I can answer? (Score:3, Informative)
For the previous project you did I had some complaints regarding the delivery and so here are some suggestions:
1. FLAC has been pretty much the standard lossless format and I don't see a good reason to use something else.
2. Keep it all in the same format (bit depth and sample rate). Last time some files were 16bit, some 24bit and whatnot. Same with the tags.
3. When you're making a torrent, don't put the audio files in one zip file, it makes no sense and it's very annoying.