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.

It's Dawn...

That would be a perfect title for some sort of metaphor. Unfortunately it's not. I've been up for the last couple of hours (got about two hours of sleep before waking up and not sleeping anymore) working on my final project for Econometrics. Running Chow tests on an index of major furniture companies {1} and the Federal Funds rate. The time periods for the Chow tests were 1995-1999:2000-2008, and 1995-2000:2001-2008. The first test showed a stronger difference but was much less statistically significant.

In simple terms I am testing to see if the Federal Funds rate (the rate you always see reported) had different effects on my index for those time periods. In both cases it is obvious that after 2000/2001 the Federal Funds rate had a greater effect on my index than in the former time period (before 2000/2001). Unfortunately, the standard error is pretty high for the model I prefer.

To get to the point I've just been formatting the data for my stats program, running the tests, etc., then all of a sudden notice that my room has gotten much lighter. I look out the window and sure enough it's dawn.

I really don't know if this is a good sign or not...

Ask mj: "Clinically Proven"

An anonymous reader asks mj: "What does 'clinically proven' mean? It's in all the commercials for drugs and whatnot. Is there anything that isn't clinically proven?"

The answer to the second part is yes and no. But you'll never hear someone advertise whether something that wasn't clinically proven.

The process of getting FDA approval for a drug is long and difficult, most drugs that companies start to develop never make it through the entire process which involves clinical studies near the end.

The studies are usually paid for (and often conducted by) the pharmaceutical company that creates the drug. The real catch, however, is that the company get to choose which studies they submit to the FDA and which ones they do not.* Moreover they are under no obligation to make the study public (e.g., publish it anywhere). The study is actually considered proprietary information.*

This post has been in the making for awhile, I was going to use Lunesta as an example which of course advertised itself as clinically proven, but previously did not post actual results of any of the clinical trials. Since that time at least one study is available on their website although details of the study are not provided which is necessary to actually evaluate whether the study was "good" or not.

The final note is important, it is extremely easy to spin studies however one wants. Hence the multiple headlines in the media, "New study suggests that [noun] [increases/decreases] chance of [disease/heart attack/stroke/whatever]." While I am not going to bother to go into details, but it is extremely difficult to both design and carry a good study (this has applications beyond medication, sociological studies, economic studies, etc., [basically anything that isn't a hard science] suffer many of the same difficulties.)

Final word: unless an independently conducted and publicly reviewed study was conducted "clincically proven" doesn't mean much at all. And don't expect the media to accurately report on "studies." Unless the organization takes a hard look at the study (which is rare) the reporting is from the abstract, which also means little by itself.

*This was at least true three months ago when the post was started. As far as I know it is still true, but I no longer remember the sources I used other than to say they were reputable.

Watching Bethel

It's been a bit since I put up a time lapse so here is one from later today. I am also working on a better script to render it, to get rid of those nasty night pictures from where they left a light on.

I also need to start writing down some of the blog posts the keep popping into my head (really, pretty much completely written) but never make here. Maybe I'll more than two regular visitors that way...

Watching Bethel

The latest, does not include today.

Actually... (aka Digital Recording II)

Assuming the background of this post, the amount of digital recording of other peoples' lives that I have through email, chats, journals, etc., is pretty amazing as well.

For anyone getting worried, save for the unfortunate of my untimely demise,* this is pretty much inaccessible to anyone but me. And even then it depends on my memory; my memory jogged by my own pictures, emails, chats, journals, writings (and blogs for that matter), etc.

Still, if you are one of the people that still read my blog, I probably have more of your life recorded than you realize. Of course, given how "digital I am," this goes two ways. Maybe more toward me than towards you (whoever you are, viz., my life has more digital recordings than most peoples'.)

*Untimely meaning before I am... old. In the most usual sense. E.g., before (or slightly before) I hit my expected lifespan. On the other hand, given the stunts that I have pulled I figure my expected lifespan is somewhere around 15, which I have obviously passed. Given that, I figure my new one is -- give or take -- 30.

Stripping Down Filenames in Bash

I've seen these two questions asked multiple times and have both haunted me from time to time, so I thought I would provide some answers, although the second is rather rudimentary.

1. Stripping the path off of a file
How often have you needed only the filename, not the path that precedes it? Fortunately most Linux distros make it pretty easy to strip off with the basename command. E.g.,

user@host:~$ basename /etc/apache2/httpd.conf
httpd.conf

Note that if the path contains spaces you will need to enclose it in quotes or escape it:

#Escaping
user@host:~$ basename /home/madjon/youth\ room\ shots/local\ youth\ demographics.xls
local youth demographics.xls

#Quoting
user@host:~$ basename "/home/madjon/youth room shots/local youth demographics.xls"
local youth demographics.xls

2. Stripping the file extension
This takes some bash string manipulation which you can find all about at tldp. If we take httpd.conf again:

# First, assign the filename to a variable:
user@host:~$ f=/etc/apache2/httpd.conf
user@host:~$ echo $f
/etc/apache2/httpd.conf

#Next, strip out any string, starting from the end of $f that matches ".*"
user@host:~$ echo ${f%.*}
/etc/apache2/httpd

Note that the variable substitution (the curly brackets) doesn't have the $ inside it. E.g., the general syntax is:

VAR=whatever
echo ${VAR%.*}

If we want to put them together:

user@host:~$ f=/etc/apache2/httpd.conf
user@host:~$ f=`basename $f`
user@host:~$ echo $f
httpd.conf
user@host:~$ echo ${f%.*}
httpd

I'm sure that this could be accomplished easier with some regex and awk or sed, but all three of those are confusing to me; simple bash scripting makes much more sense to me. I hope this helps whomever.