A spreadsheet for the ReverbNation Sponsored Songs giveaway

Yesterday I posted about ReverbNation's Microsoft Windows Sponsored Songs giveaway.  Since making that post, I decided to do a little more work to make the songs a little more accessible.  The ReverbNation page allows you to view no more than 20 entries at a time; through a lot of copying and pasting (51 pages worth) and a little text manipulation using my favourite text editor, gVim, I managed to create a spreadsheet with information about all 1008 (yeah, a few more than the advertised 1000) songs in it.  

You won't find links to the actual songs in the spreadsheet, because it is not possible to do that given the way the site is set up.  What you will find is the artist, location, genre, and title of each song.  A read-only version of the spreadsheet can be found right here.  If you view the spreadsheet in List View (by selecting View -> List View from the Google Docs menu), you can sort the spreadsheet by any of the columns.  You can also export the spreadsheet (File -> Export) into a variety of formats, so if you want to have more filtering and sorting options than those offered by Google Docs, this is your best bet.

If you find any errors or incomplete data in the spreadsheet, please let me know and I will fix it as soon as I am able to.  I hope this helps at least a few people find some cool music that may otherwise have gone unnoticed.  Happy sorting, filtering, and listening!

URLs:

http://totallyfreemusic.blogspot.com/2009/07/free-music-resource-microsoft-windows.html

http://www.reverbnation.com/windows

http://www.vim.org/

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=tpIKLeAWr2ildRYi841Lp2g

Free Music Resource: Microsoft Windows Sponsored Songs from ReverbNation

David over at Music Musings already beat me to this post, but this is such a cool giveaway, and its scope so huge, that it deserves to be posted about again.  ReverbNation has launched a new initiative called "Sponsored Songs", in which 1000 songs from 1000 artists are being made available for free download.  The music is kept free by ads that are embedded into the cover art in the MP3s (or M4As, if you choose to download that format); all of the MP3s I've downloaded have a small Windows banner that takes up about one quarter of the cover artwork, and the album for all of them is listed as Microsoft Windows Sponsored Songs.  I guess the assumption here is that enough people actually view the cover art embedded within the files to make it worthwhile for the sponsor; to be honest, I find the press release to be a little on the optimistic side, but at the same time I hope that this program succeeds, because it has the potential to open up some exciting possibilities for free music. 

 

The first advertiser to participate in Sponsored Songs is Microsoft Windows, with free songs being available from http://www.reverbnation.com/windows until September 24, 2009.  I am guessing that after that date, another sponsor will take over, perhaps with a new set of songs to download, but there should still be plenty of time to grab anything that interests you there.  The site lacks a search engine, so looking for a particular artist takes a bit of work; you can pick the starting letter of the artist's name and filter the list by a few broad genres (Alternative, Electronica/Dance, Hip Hop, Jazz, Latin, Pop, and Rock), and the list can be sorted alphabetically or by popularity.  While it would be nice to have more options for filtering and sorting, I think that the best way to find the best songs in this giveaway may be good, old fashioned word of mouth.

 

With that in mind, I'd like to mention a few particularly good songs that I've downloaded.  I've only downloaded about a dozen songs from there so far, mainly from artists that I already recognize, but I'm sure I'll be going back for many more before the offer expires.  Some of my favourite songs so far include Sofia Talvik's beautiful "Burning Fields"; The Lemonheads' "I Just Can't Take It Anymore", a cover of a Gram Parsons song with a great country rock feel that reminds me of Blue Rodeo; Logan's "Goodbye", an excellent hard rock tune that David recommended; and Celldweller's "Ursa Minor (Neutron Mix)", a short but very sweet song that packs a lot of atmosphere and drama into less than 2 minutes.

 

If anyone comes across anything particularly cool there, please leave a comment here so the readers of this blog and I can check it out.  I'm sure that there are tons of great songs available, so let's hear about them!  Happy listening!

[UPDATE 2009-07-07]

I have created a spreadsheet that lists all of the songs, along with the artist, genre, and location information for each song.  You can access a read-only version of the spreadsheet right here - I hope it helps some cool music to be found!

 

URLs:

http://musicddm.blogspot.com/2009/06/free-download-friday-16-logan.html

http://www.reverbnation.com/controller/main/press#24june09

http://www.reverbnation.com/windows

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=tpIKLeAWr2ildRYi841Lp2g

Free Music Resource: OverClocked ReMix - Video Game Music Community

If you follow this blog regularly, then you might have guessed that I am a fan of video games. Video games have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember, and one of the most memorable parts of many a game for me is its soundtrack. If you play video games too, then you might feel the same way; try to imagine Super Mario Bros. without its infectious theme music, or a Final Fantasy game without a sweeping, orchestral score, or Tetris without the Russian folk song "Korobeiniki" - they might look and play the same, but they would certainly not be the same games that they are now.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that I like to listen to video game music even when I'm not playing games. I started by hooking my Super Nintendo up to my parents' stereo system and recording music onto a cassette; games where the music kept playing even when the game was paused, like Star Fox and Final Fantasy III, worked best for this. Shortly after I began using the Internet, I started downloading MIDI versions of my favourite game music to listen to on my computer. When Napster came along, I used it to download a lot of music from my favourite N64 games - mainly the two Legend of Zelda games that were released for that system.

Then about five years ago I discovered a site which will be the focus of this post. OverClocked ReMix - Video Game Music Community is a website that hosts fan arrangements of video game music. There is an absolutely massive collection of music at this site, and a wide range of ways in which to browse, search, and acquire it. If you have something specific in mind, you can use the search feature to zero in on it quickly; it is worth noting that the search engine is a Google Custom Search Engine, so the results are usually very comprehensive and accurate. Otherwise, you can browse the site's contents, which is something I like to do occasionally as I almost always find music from games that I had forgotten about. Whether you search or browse, you will eventualy end up at a page containing information about the specific remix you've found as well as a list of links from where it can be downloaded.

If you find more than a few songs on the site that you like, then downloading them individually can be quite time consuming. Fortunately, there are a number of torrents available that can help you download larger collections of songs more efficiently. Most of the torrents are full-length albums, each one based on a specific game (including the official soundtrack for Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix). There are also two torrents that contain all but the very latest remixes, so if you want to download nearly everything from the site and have about 6.3 GB of free space on your computer, these torrents are definitely your best bet. Once you've downloaded all of those songs, then keeping up with the latest mixes is easy with the site's RSS feed (I have it in the "Free music from around the web" section of this blog's sidebar); you can even follow them on Twitter, if you're so inclined.

There is a wide variety of genres featured in the various mixes - I've heard everything from classical to country to rock to electronic music to... uh, the Legend of Zelda theme being played on Heineken bottles (no, really, it just came out yesterday - check it out). I like to put all of the songs into a big playlist and set it to shuffle. When I hear something I really like (which happens quite often), I look for songs either by the same artist or from the same game and add them to the playback queue. With more than a day's worth of music (and that's only the music from games that I've played - roughly a quarter of what's available on the site), things are always kept varied and interesting. I think my favourite song that I've found is "Super Mario Bros. Underworld Rock" by dimmer, which intersperses the famous underground music from the original Super Mario Bros. game with a driving guitar rock sound, with a few sound effects from the game acting as additional instruments. A couple of other favourites are Derek Oren and Jeremy Robson's two "Cantata for Dancing" tracks from Final Fantasy VI, which are epic sounding orchestral/choral pieces based on the music from that game's final boss fight (one of the pieces I once had on a cassette tape, incidentally); and Bladiator and The Orichalcon's "Final Doom Clairvoyant Elegy", which features some beautiful piano playing over an electronic beat.

With somewhere in the vicinity of 2000 songs available, the few songs I've mentioned obviously only scratch the surface - I'm sure that after you've spent a few hours listening to some mixes, you'll have your own list of favourites, based on some combination of your own taste in both music and video games. Happy listening!

URLs:
http://www.ocremix.org
http://www.ocremix.org/browse/
http://www.ocremix.org/torrents/
http://twitter.com/ocremix
http://www.ocremix.org/remix/OCR01845/

Free Music Resource: Classical.com

If you're a regular visitor to this blog, then you may have already noticed the "Free music from around the web" section on the sidebar. The purpose of this section is to spotlight some free music sources that I regularly download from; each source includes a link to its website as well as to the latest offering from that source. I hope these links will be found useful by enabling more music to be discovered beyond what I cover in my posts.

Right now, I would like to highlight one of these sources - the one called Free Classical Music. This is actually a very small subset of a site called Classical.com, which features a wealth of information about classical music as well as a few other genres. In order to be able to download anything from the site, you will need to register for a free account, at which time you can begin exploring the site at your leisure. Once you've got your account set up, though, you can immediately begin downloading free albums from the site.

I've only been using this site for a couple of weeks, and in that time they have been offering 2 albums for download each week while also keeping the previous week's 2 albums available; I don't know if this has always been or will always be the case, but it currently allows for a decent selection at any given time. Some of the albums are compilations featuring works by various composers, like a recent album with works by Monteverdi and Schutz; others feature a selection of works by a single composer, my favourite so far being a Mozart album with 2 concertos, a symphony, and the overture to "The Magic Flute" (that one has more than 90 minutes of music). Full information about the most current albums can be obtained by clicking on their album covers.

My usual tendency with other classical music resources is to go for composers or works that I am already familiar with. Since the albums here are chosen by Classical.com, I'm not always able to do that, so I have found this to be a great way to sample classical music that is not necessarily familiar to me. Download speeds have been very fast for me; often it only takes a few minutes from starting my download to being able to listen to it.

The album selection is updated each Tuesday. If you're a fan of RSS feeds, I have created one using Feedity that you can use to keep up to date with the latest offerings; you can subscribe to it at http://feedity.com/rss.aspx/classical-com/W1NWUlE (NOTE: unfortunately, this feed has stopped working). Otherwise, be sure to keep checking back on the site every Tuesday to see what's new. Happy listening! 

URLs:
http://www.classical.com/free-classical-music.php
http://www.classical.com/
http://www.classical.com/register/
http://totallyfreemusic.blogspot.com/2009/02/free-music-resource-classical-music-on.html
http://feedity.com/

http://feedity.com/rss.aspx/classical-com/W1NWUlE (no longer working)

Free music resource: classical music on the Internet

I haven't posted here in a while. Part of the reason for that is that I've been all over the place musically in the last little while. I was on a brief metal kick, at which time I had at least half a dozen albums and artists that I wanted to post about. I thought about even making a series of metal posts, but I couldn't really make up my mind which one to start with. I'm sure I'll eventually get back to that, but for the time being I may as well make a post about what has really caught my fancy lately: classical music.

I've tried to get into classical music before, as it has always felt like something I "should" be listening to, especially as a fan of progressive rock: for example, the complex, multi-part arrangements of bands like Rush, Yes, and Dream Theater would seem to owe a lot to classical music; Trans-Siberian Orchestra's rock opera Beethoven's Last Night, a long-time favourite album of mine, relies heavily on the music of Beethoven and other famous composers; and I have long enjoyed the pairing of rock groups with orchestras as the likes of Metallica, KISS, and Dream Theater have done. I've tried, but could never seem to make a serious effort to get into it until now.

My current fascination with the genre stems from playing the "Mii Maestro" mode of Wii Music. This little game allows you to conduct a virtual orchestra by using the Wii remote as a baton. Among the pieces that can be conducted are Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" (a small section from the finale of his 9th symphony) and Vivaldi's "Spring" (one of the movements from his "Four Seasons" concerto). I had listened to the full versions of both of these pieces before, but pretending to conduct them sparked a new interest in me to give them another listen. I have also been back to working on my PhD full-time these last few weeks. I have generally found that instrumental music works better than vocal music when I am doing any sort of reading, so this provided a great reason to check out some more classical music.

Fortunately, there are plenty of places to download free classical music on the Internet, so you can easily start (or perhaps augment) your own classical music collection without spending a dime. The purpose of this post will be to point out a few of these sites.

The first such site I've found is called Classic Cat, which is actually a directory with links to thousands of classical performances. The home page contains a list of the top 100 composers. Clicking on a composer's name (I'll use Beethoven as an example) brings up a page with a list of works that can be freely downloaded. This list can be sorted in a variety of ways, including Name (the default), Genre (e.g. Ballet, Concerto, String Quartet, and Symphony), Year, and Popularity. I have found sorting by Popularity to be extremely useful, as it can be quite intimidating to be faced with a list of dozens of pieces and not know where to start. After the name of each piece, a series of numbers and letters in parentheses indicate how many performances of that piece are available, the approximate length of the longest performance, and whether or not any video is available. Clicking on the name of a piece (e.g Symphony No. 8 in F major) brings up a page with information about that piece, including the name and approximate length of each movement. Further down the page is a list of MP3s available; information here includes the name of the performer, the movements included in the performance (sometimes you will see "complete" here, meaning that the entire piece is available; other times only a few movements will be included), and a link to a page where you can download the actual MP3s.

There is such a wealth of material that can be found on Classic Cat that, so far, I haven't felt much of a need to look elsewhere for classical music downloads. A couple of additional sources that I have found useful are Musopen and, surprisingly, Wikipedia. The files on Wikipedia are ogg files; if you don't know how to use ogg files, there are instructions there. The main thing I've used Wikipedia for so far has been a complete performance of Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons", which I could not find anywhere else.

I hope that this brief introduction to free classical music on the Internet has been useful to you. I would also really love to know what anyone's favourite classical music is. I have not yet branched out too far from Beethoven, but I would really love to explore more of the genre, so knowing what other people like can often be a big help in looking for new music. Have fun, and happy listening!

URLs:
http://www.classiccat.net/
http://www.musopen.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sound/list

Free Music Resource: Jamendo

Jamendo is a site that offers free access to music that has been published with Creative Commons licences. For more information on Creative Commons (since it's really beyond the scope of this blog), please see the Creative Commons website; for the purpose of Jamendo, all you really need to know is that it allows you to download as much music as you want, freely and legally.

I find the entire interface and design of the Jamendo website to be very intuitive and user-friendly. Clicking on the Music tab yields a list of albums with thumbnails of the cover art; these albums can be sorted in a variety of ways, including popularity (overall, monthly, or weekly), latest releases, most downloaded, most listened to, and others. A list of tags on the right can be used to narrow down the list of albums; you can also search for tags if you don't see what you're looking for in the list. A general-purpose search box is also available; this will search through just about any text associated with an artist, album, or song and can be very useful if you are otherwise unable to find what you are looking for. Finally, a music player is available to listen to songs directly on the web page without having to download anything; I have found myself using the player to preview a track or 2 from an album, and if I like what I hear I just download the whole album. The entire website is also available in both French and English.

Everything I have described in the last paragraph should be availalble to anyone who visits Jamendo. Those who choose to register (for free) will also receive some additional benefits, including the ability to create playlists and select their favourite albums. The FAQ also makes mention of "additional services" for members, which will be announced in the coming weeks.

I have been actively using Jamendo for about a week now and have already been able to discover a ton of great music, which I will certainly be featuring on this blog as soon as I can find some words to write about it. In the meantime, why not head on over to Jamendo and begin discovering what it has to offer. If you come across any really great finds, please leave a comment here so that all of this blog's readers can check them out too.

Happy listening!

URLs:
http://www.jamendo.com/
http://creativecommons.org/
http://www.jamendo.com/en/faq