The Digital Mozart Edition

[Dog Sniper]

Has anyone had trouble downloading PDFs from the Dgital Mozart Edition? In my experience, about 1 in 3 fail to download. For example, the website fails to return the PDFs for some of the movements of the Serenade in B-flat (KV 361/370a), namely movements 2 and 6. It also fails to return movement 1 of Piano Concerto No. 21 (KV 467). I have had failed returns on numerous other scores, which I can't remember at the moment.

The PDF returning seems to be the only flaky part of the website; I can still view JPEGs of the scores, but I greatly prefer PDFs for practical purposes.

[imslp]

Well, the problem with the DME site is that for whatever reason, the site designer got it into his/her head to generate PDFs on the fly with huge images. I mean, generating PDFs on the fly is bad enough, but with that image size it's something else. They should have found another site designer

[Dog Sniper]

Now that I consider it, the bigger PDFs seem to be the ones that fail. For instance, the two biggest PDFs for the wind serenade in B-flat are exactly the ones that don't work. (The predicted PDF sizes are given if you mouse-over the PDF icons.) The same goes for the piano concerto I mentioned. However, I still don't know precisely what the cause of the problem is.

I agree with you in that I don't care for the site design. The interface is strange, and the fact that many of the links actually open new windows makes navigating a problem (if you use the Back button in your browser, for instance).

[imslp]

Now that I consider it, the bigger PDFs seem to be the ones that fail. For instance, the two biggest PDFs for the wind serenade in B-flat are exactly the ones that don't work. (The predicted PDF sizes are given if you mouse-over the PDF icons.) The same goes for the piano concerto I mentioned. However, I still don't know precisely what the cause of the problem is.

I think I know: the PHP script times out before the PDF file is finished being created. The same thing will happen on IMSLP if the page loads for too long, but that usually does not happen because PDF files are not created on the fly on IMSLP. Which is why I think the DME site should fire their site designer...

[Yagan Kiely]

How do you download them??

[pml]

Perhaps Arcticwind, your web browser is the problem?

I'm using Firefox 2 on a Mac and have had no problem aside for the usual one that there are two servers handling the scores: dme.mozarteum.at has the critical reports PDFs (Kritischer Bericht) while the PDFs of the musical works are auto-generated from the individual scanned graphics using Ghostscript, running on a server called coblitz.codeen.org, and that one seems to have occasional "issues". The Safari web browser on the other hand spits the dummy at whatever Javascript or other rigmarole is going on when trying to display the PDFs.

I've already managed to download one-third of Series 1 (Church music) and Series 3 (Lieder etc), most of the Symphonies in Series 4, and working my way through the piano concertos in Series 5 (i.e. about 15 volumes complete in total, another 10 mostly so). Symphonies K 543, K 550 (both versions) and Piano concerto no. 1 can be downloaded as single files, so occasionally the server can handle large files up to 20 megabytes.

Regards, Philip

[Yagan Kiely]

They always generate one after another, much like VARIATIONS, but without d/l the html page how do I d/l it as a pdf. I use FF2 on windows.

[pml]

Hi,

I see what you mean, when looking at the table of contents for a particular page there are several display options (including showing the score page alongside a page from the critical commentary).

Make sure you click on the PDF icon on the right of the link giving the page numbers (not all page ranges have this option; for instance, large works over a hundred pages say will have a link to the graphics "3 – 158", but no PDF link beside it. On the other hand, there will be PDF links for the individual movements (sometimes annoyingly so, many individual pages will have to be downloaded, e.g. the Lieder and Canons are usually each less than 4 pages long, and sometimes only single pages).

Regards, PML

[pml]

(Bump)

Hi guys,

I noticed one contributor is uploading individual pages from the Digital Mozart Edition, and Matthieu has been very nice and posted a message for him to stop and desist for the time being - at the rate he is going he will be occupied for the next 15 years.

Anyway, I just wanted to raise the general question: as the Bärenreiter editions have been published in Germany and are scientific editions, hence copyrightable for 25 years under German law, should IMSLP look to host some of the works as an alternative site to dme.mozarteum.at?

A brief look at the catalogue shows that aside from Series X (the supplement) about 80% of the 100-odd volumes of music were published prior to 1982. Would it then follow that the Berne Rule of the Shorter Term would apply to these volumes, or are there other considerations, such as the nationality of the authors and whether they have been deceased 50 years for their work to properly be regarded as public domain?

It would appear Diapason is working on the principle that the volume of masses edited by Walter Senn (1975) or arias edited by Stefan Kunze (1967) are now public domain. (The only work I saw him upload yesterday was from the miscellaneous piano pieces edited by Wolfgang Plath (1982), which I'd already flagged as a copyright violation.)

Anyway: it is still a time-consuming process to obtain scores from the DME website, and before I gave up I had downloaded the entirety of Series I (sacred music), Series III (songs, canons) and Series V (concertos), as well as making a fairly good start on Series IV (orchestral works) - for my own private, personal use, of course! - so about 42 of the 101 volumes in Series I to IX. I suspect from the volume of downloads reported at the DME website others from this forum may have downloaded similar quantities. I don't know if the DME have been made aware of the problems accessing their site - particularly for large files - but perhaps it might be an opportune time to make an overture to them on the basis of mirroring their resources? Or else to decide that IMSLP will explicitly not host material from the NMA?

Regards, Philip

[imslp]

I, at one time in my life, decided that it would be futile to compete with the ISM on the NMA. But I've grown wise since then, and decided a while ago to open the floodgates to the NMA

This came about due to several reasons. I've received reports that some of the NMA scans were very poorly cleaned, and that users had to spend much time cleaning them and making them fit for printing. And it'd would be very nice if people could submit the results of their labour, so we may have higher quality NMA scans compared to the DME itself.

Even without that, I think it is a very good idea to map out what exactly is in the public domain, to the extent permissible by law on IMSLP. But as you say, we will need to check whether the editor is German or not. Since Barenreiter itself is in Germany, I'm sure a vast majority of the editors are also German, but it may be a good idea to check to make sure. I don't know about the NMA, but if it is anything like the BGA, then there shouldn't be that many editors to check; at the very least that effort would very much pale in comparison to the effort of actually submitting the files

In addition, I also think it is always a good idea to have a openly-editable format of any library, so that we can improve on it. I believe the previous freeze on the Mozart category was detrimental in the fact that people would because of it stop submitting many other editions of Mozart.

[pml]

Hi Feldmahler!

I suppose the issue is how then should this proceed - I for one would envisage it as a project:

firstly, to check the information on editors and volumes, to map out which of the individual pre-1982 volumes it would be permissible to upload. As you say, the number of editors is finite and the majority of them are probably German citizens;

secondly, to arrange amongst the contributors which further works need to be obtained - as I said, I already have Series I and V reorganised into rather large PDFs for each volume - varying in size from 23 to 113 MB!

then to share out the compilation and compression of the PDFs from the DME into a more convenient format (some works are already available as entire PDFs, or would be better suited to being split slightly less fussily than the website does) and uploading.

Most of the scans are reasonable in my experience, although the top of some pages are a problem (some bar numbers deleted).

[imslp]

Well put! Would you like to be the leader of this project?

[pml]

Nice try! I suppose yes, but only if I can delegate freely - since my time is fairly tightly demarcated at present!

PS Project page (draft)

[Matthieu]

Hi all,

some months ago, I started to download and cleanup systematically the NMA for myself. My aim was to reconstruct each volume as a clean high quality pdf file (including blank pages), in a similar spirit as BGA. For the moment I have made a little pause (!), but I already completed ~1/2 of the job. Complying with your project would only consist in splitting those files (PD volumes only) and upload. How could we share these ?
Best regards,

Matthieu

[imslp]

pml: Hahaha... well what I meant by project leader is more just keeping all the contributors submitting smoothly, and providing knowledge on the background information (on the editors and volumes for example). Since you seem to know the NMA well, I thought you'd make a nice project leader

Of course there is also no hurry... IMSLP is not going to disappear anytime soon Just do it bit by bit steadily and we should have something nice soon.

Matthieu: Would a torrent be possible? There are a few free private trackers around, and even without that you can just publish the torrent to DHT (trackerless) and we can get it with a compatible client (Azureus for example).