Textual Reflexions

In an effort to avoid searching for CDs all around my flat, I begun to transfer them all to my hard drive in the lossless FLAC format and enter their data into Musicbrainz database. The most time consuming part was entering Brilliant Classic’s Complete Bach Works. At a speed of one CD a day I’ve already finished Volumes I and II of the collection.

For those that intend help with the work I advise reading Musicbrainz’s Classical Style Guide or look at the titles already entered.

I didn’t have time to listen to all these CDs, but there are some known artist names in the lot, like e.g. Trevor Pinnock or Jordi Savall so I will listen to those attentively.

I post the links on Musicbrainz to the first volume of the series to keep track of them and correct them more easily.

Volume I

1. CD I-1: Brandenburg Concertos 1-2-3: Musica Amphion feat. conductor Pieter-Jan Belder
2. CD I-2: Brandenburg Concertos 4-5-6: Musica Amphion feat. conductor Pieter-Jan Belder
3. CD I-3: Orchestral Suites 1 & 2: La Stravaganza feat. conductor Andrew Manze
4. CD I-4: Orchestral Suites 3 & 4: La Stravaganza feat. conductor Andrew Manze
5. CD I-5: Violin Concertos
6. CD I-6: Harpsichord Concertos BWV 1052-1055
7. CD I-7: Harpsichord Concertos BWV 1056-1058, 1060, 1065
8. CD I-8: Concertos for 2 & 3 Harpsichords
9. CD I-9: Double Concertos
10. CD I-10: Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin I
11. CD I-11: Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin II
12. CD I-12: Cello Suites 1-3-5
13. CD I-13: Cello Suites 2-4-6
14. CD I-14: Flute Sonatas BWV 1030-1032
15. CD I-15: Flute Sonatas BWV 1033-1035
16. CD I-16: Lute Works BWV 995-997
17. CD I-17: Lute Woks BWV 998-1000
18. CD I-18: Viola da Gamba Sonatas
19. CD I-19: The Musical Offering
20. CD I-20: Violin Sonatas BWV 1014-1016
21. CD I-21: Violin Sonatas BWV 1017-1019
22. CD I-22: Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach
23. CD I-23: Violin Sonatas / Trio Sonatas

La fille d’Octobre ­- Hurle-Vent

	MP3 192k	Ogg 260k
	MP3 192k	Ogg 260k

While looking for a standard way to incorporate Creative Commons metadata to BitTorrent torrents I found some interesting applications of both technologies to the music industry:

• Jamendo­-a repository of non-mainstream music albums as the one that you can see in the picture. Most music on the site is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence, thus the use and distribution of music is free in most common occasions. In order to save bandwidth Jamendo uses Peer-to-Peer technology (and yes, it is legal; the legality of a technology doesn’t depend of its misuses).
• Magnatune­-is a little recording company whose motto is “We are not evil”. Indeed its business model is quite intriguing: all recordings are free to download, half of their income goes to the artists and you can choose the price of the albums you decide to buy. I really appreciate their refusal of the DRM techniques: these techniques are quite useless, since they bother legitimate users and are usually ineffective against illegitimate users. Magnatune has also a very easy way to licence music for commercial purposes.
• Prodigem­-a hosting company that simplifies the use of torrents: in just a few clicks you can upload your files to their servers, choose the licence to use (all CC licences are there and some commercial licences too), create a torrent and even charge a fee for every download. The torrents are feeded by Prodigem servers until there are 3 other seeds on the Internet and after that you don’t pay Prodigem for the bandwith.

Update: Prodigem was acquired by MoveDigital and is a of July 18^th 2006 a part of its services. See the announcement on their blog.

In order to add something to my neverending projects I have started the Wikimonography - Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin. It is part of an überproject of Multimedia CDs intended to provide a complete encyclopedia about the best authors and musicians of every time.

The complete works of many scientists, musicians and writers are in the public domain, but I haven’t found yet an organized collection about them. I try to give a humble example of what could be done in the domain of the GFDL and I hope that others will follow me.

I put some informations on the project page, even if the most active page is that of the Italian chapter.