Musopen and Sonatas Torrent Seed

See below for info on the torrent.

I just read about an awesome site on Arstechnica. Musopen.com is a site dedicated to putting recordings and sheet music of classical music in the public domain. E.g., you can now download Beethoven's fifth symphony, or use it in a video, or do whatever you want with for free. Legally.

They just finished all off Beethoven's sonatas, and, naturally, I had to have them all. And it's thanks to people like me that their bandwidth bill goes through the roof.

At this point if all you care about is this cool new site you can stop reading. If you want all of Beethoven's sonatas read about the torrent below.


The Torrent
To help with the bandwidth I created a torrent that is currently you can download here. It's being tracked by The Pirate Bay, an irony given the site's name and reputation, but it was the first public tracker I could find.

This torrent contains all of Beethoven's sonatas. All of them were downloaded from www.musopen.com on April 23^rd, 2008. It has everything that was available for download at the time except for Michael Hawley performing “Sonata No. 21 in C Major 'Waldstein', Op. 53,” as the files were returning 404 errors.

Important Note on Files

These are not the exact same files available from www.musopen.com. The metadata has been changed in almost all of them to be more standardized. The artist and composed for every piece is now “Ludwig van Beethoven,” the album artist is whoever performed the piece.

Each sonata also has it's own album now, taking the form of “Sonata no. X (www.musopen.com)” or “Sonata no. X (www.musopen.com / Artist)” if more than one person performed the sonata.

Finally, the sonata name has been removed from the track name. E.g., “Sonata No. 1 in F Minor, Op. 2 No. 1 - I. Allegro” is now simply “I. Allegro” as it has its own album.

Torrent File Structure

The file structure is fairly straightforward, when there is only one performer for the piece the structure is “Sonata Name/Track.mp3”. If more than one person performed a certain piece (such as no. 31) the structure becomes “Sonata Name/Performing Artist/track.mp3”.

Every folder has a file called “About.pdf” in it, which is simply a PDF from the page the sonata was downloaded from.