Brainstorm in Progress: Music

Showing posts with label Music. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Public Domain Music Keeps Getting Better

Image via WikipediaHow does public domain music keep getting better? For one thing, the technology being used to clean up sound files has gotten significantly better. Many of the online archives of audio suffered from some pretty raw recordings from wax-cylinders and old 78s. This music is in the public domain and free but much of it was listenable only for real fans. There is some really amazing music out there too, for instance Django Reinhardt is well represented in http://archive.org. You can pull up whole collections of his music here and here for instance. You can listen to the music there, embed the playlist on your blog, or click on a link and download the whole collection. And it is worth doing now because the files have been cleaned up in one of the many programs that clean up audio files to get all the pops and hisses out of old recordings. Many use Audacity which is a free open source audio recording and editor package. There are instructions on their wiki on how to clean up audio files. Archive.org is an important site on the internet because it is a huge repository of public domain and openly-licensed texts, images, movies, music, and any kind of recording (poetry readings, famous speeches, lectures, radio programs, etc.).

This music is important in the history of music and jazz and should be available. Many of these recordings would not be available to anyone if it weren't for Archive.Org. I also want to recommend Django Reinhardt's music as a cure to seasonal affective disorder - you just can't be sad listening to his music!

Friday, June 03, 2011

Google Music: Bask in the market socialist sunshine!

Image via WikipediaAs you are probably aware, I am a big fan of Google. I have been using and writing about their products from very early on. In fact, this blog was acquired by Google way back when. They are a real conundrum for me at times; they represent the best of what I think companies should be and yet they are still corporate; they are not a foundation or an open source organization, but they have open source projects, products, and contribute to the open source community. Tonight I am loading Google Music on my computer. Interestingly enough, Google's Music Manager relies on about 26 open source projects to do what it does. I recommend reading the licensing documentation because that will really tell you what you can expect from this new tool/service. What Google Music is meant to do is to upload all of your music from all of your devices and host them in one spot which you can then access from any device (phone, computer, etc.). And yes, this means iTunes. I am not sure how Apple is going to take this. This means the iTunes at my work PC, my iTunes on my home computer can now be combined in one service. It all goes from the locked down silos at Apple into the socialist free market sunshine of the cloud. How does this effect the digital rights? If I bought something from Apple to be played in an Apple platform did I also buy the right to reproduce that where ever I want? I am really curious to know how this is going to play out legally.

For now, Google's Music Manager is churning through my 21 days of music and has uploaded most of Beethoven and rejected nearly 350 songs. I am not sure what that is about yet, but I will post updates to my installation and cloudification of my music on Twitter - I am at geoffcain in the Twittersphere. If you have already installed Google Music and are using it, post your insights to the comments below or email me - I am interested to know how it worked for you too.

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Open Source Music Textbook

Image via Wikipedia

Musopen is a free source of public domain music, both recordings and sheet music. They are also creating an open source music theory textbook. I would love to see an open source music appreciation course using these materials. This site combined with other free resources like the Wikipedia Sound List would provide a lot of material for such a course

"Musopen is an online music library of copyright free (public domain) music. We want to give the world access to music without the legal hassles so common today. There is a great deal of music that has expired copyrights, but almost no recordings of this music is in the public domain. We aim to record or obtain recordings that have no copyrights so that our visitors may listen, re-use, or in any way enjoy music. Put simply, our mission is to set music free."

The music is very well organized and down-loadable. Also you can embed the music in a web page so if one was to create a music history textbook in a wiki, one could easily use this. I love the example I chose below. "Entrance of the Gods into Valhalla" was the processional at my wedding and the Marine Band does some interesting things with it that really allow you to hear the textures and layers in this piece: