Let me preface this by saying that I was going to ask Tim in private,
but Angela told me that this would be a better place. In the next couple days,
I'm going to be rewriting the English wikipedia's sound FAQ, and there's a couple things
I want to grouse about.
First, for those of you who have never heard of it, the Mutopia project is to
songs what Project Gutenberg is to text. The offer lots of public
domain midis that are great additions to the project. In the past, I've converted
them the hard way (tying the sound card of one computer to the sound card of
another). I'd record it into wav, encode it as ogg, and then upload it.
Here's where my requests come in:
(1) The 2 megabyte upload limit - I discovered through trial and error that uploads
are capped at 2 megabytes. For full-length songs, this is way, way too small. A
3-4 minutes song in ogg format at average quality is about 5 megs. I have to set my
encoder to its lowest settings (0 or 1 out of 10) to get it under 2 megs.
Angela has said (rightly so) that full length songs belong at Wikisource, not on
Wikipedia itself. So the above changes should be made there.
(2) Someone was nice enough to recommend an open source (GPL) program that
does midi->ogg conversion much more easily. However, it is a *NIGHTMARE* to get
installed. All of the english hosts are 404 (I had to use the internet archive)
- I hope you speak Nihongo. To get it working under windows you have to
download the patches - 19(!) rar files worth.
I want the sound FAQ to refer to it, but I pity the poor person who has to go through
what I did to get it working. The easiest solution would be simply to zip up the working
version I have here and let Wikipedia host it.
I'd like these issues address in the near future so I can start rewriting the FAQ.
--Mark