You Can Learn Something New Every Day!

I was in my office at IIT's Main Campus today and I realized I had no tunes to listen to! Well, I had to do something about that so I jumped on All the Web since they have an audio search function. I made some great discoveries!

1.) Since I'm a choral music kind of guy, I discovered a great choir! There is absolutely no info about them on their site, since the site is very clearly just for them and they all know about each other. It would appear that they are young folks from all over Europe who get together to form a choir every two years in Szekszárd, Hungary. The choir is Éneklö Hét and all three of their CDs are on the site in .mp3 format. Very nice work over a broad range of the classical literature and even spirituals. Bravo, Éneklö Hét (whoever you are)!

2.) A jazz artist, Kellye Gray, who has a “bootlegs” page on her site with three nice downloadable tunes.

3.) A whole library of music at Ibiblio (the public's library and digital archive)! You can find it (or actually you probably couldn't if it weren't for me stumbing across it) at http://music.ibiblio.org/pub/multimedia/. It's pretty raw but there are some tremendous directories there. One is nearly the entire catalog of a now-defunct Seattle record label, Pandora. Their catalog covers mostly classical and is available in both Ogg Vorbis and mp3 formats. The whole Pandora catalog is also mirrored at http://hebb.mit.edu/FreeMusic/Pandora/.

Other directories on this server (which on further investigation all turned out to be linked from the iBiblio music page) feature a lot of “freely tradable” music, most of which is in a format that's entirely new to me, the Shorten (SHN) lossless compressed audio format. I had to research the shn format (the FAQ at http://userpages.umbc.edu/~hamilton/shnfaq.html is not working right now [update: woking as of Midnight]) then find some software that would play it (there are plugins for WinAmp and for Foobar2000—another new one on me—at the etree.org wiki Software You Need page.). Finally I learned about wget, an open-source command-line application that will download files using HTTP, HTTPS and FTP and will even recursively download entire directories if they are open to that [Update: best place to download is Heiko Herold's Windows wget spot for SSL (HTTPS) support]. Rumour has it that there is even a version that will support SFTP although I have not tracked that one down.

Learning new stuff is alway fun. (Never mind that I should have been finishing homework or grading midterms!) Martha Stewart always says at the end of her radio spots, “ You can learn something new every day on Ask Martha”. Well, Martha, I can still can learn something new everyday but I'll bet you have a pretty tough time trying to do that right now.

Posted by Ray Trygstad | Category: Music | 08:48 PM