| The Virtual Philharmonic Orchestra (VPO) | Music Recordings |
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Janáček, Leos (1854-1928)String Quartet No.2, "Intimate Letters", 1st Movement |
Latest Recording: 23.Apr 2010    Duration: 5:34 min.
5.1 Surround: 30.Mar 2010 Duration: 5:34 min. This file requires Windows Media Player 10 or higher.Other music players (e.g. Winamp) will only play the two front left and right channels, whereas the Windows Media player will properly map all 5.1 channels onto 2 channels in case of lacking surround hardware. |
Recording HistoryI began to sequence a MIDI recording in October 1995. Naturally, the sound of those solo strings on FM synthesis was really bad, so I hesitated for a long time to publish any MP3 recording. Even later when I got better sound generators, I was not able to create any satisfactory sounding rendition of this music. Only with the Garritan Personal Orchestra I saw a chance of making those strings sound good. However, the deficiencies of my old MAESTRO-1 system prevented me from creating this recording. After the new MAESTRO-2 computer had been set up in February 2010, I was able to use the draft sequence and complete it into a full rendition of this first movement. There is still something to do; some of the trills for example are not ideal. I wanted to use the build-in trills, but they sounded too mechanical. Well, the trills now sound like a bad player is trying to do some trills... so I will have to work on this more. This is the second music recording where I experimented with a spatial surround setup. This time I choose to mix right from the beginning in 5.1 surround instead of creating the surround later: the instruments are rendered in dry mono from the ARIA player, and are then placed with the sonitus:fx filter in their locations. Then the reverb from sonitus:fx is added. This appeared to put more load on the system: sometimes the audio engine crashed. I chose the following arrangement: violin1: front left; violin 2: front right; viola: rear left; cello: rear right. The down-mix had the following problem: by default the rear instruments are mixed into the final stereo mix with a 3dB reduction... therefore they sound quieter than I had in mind originally. I may change this in the future to make the balance more equalised. Discussions
Previous RecordingsThe list below contains all avaliable recordings of this music that I created. These are often experimental and are made available just for reference. Right-click and save the files instead of trying to play them by a direct link - some of them are very large! 23.Apr 2010: Janacek_SQ2M1_100423.wma Duration: 5:34. Filesize: 5.1 MB Codec: Windows Media Audio 9.2, VBR Quality 90, 44 kHz, stereo 1-pass VBR, 152 kbps (vbr), 2 channels (stereo), 44.1 kHz, 16 bits/sample, wma, compression ratio: 0.11. 30.Mar 2010: Janacek_SQ2M1_100329a.wma Duration: 5:29. Filesize: 4.8 MB Codec: Windows Media Audio 9.2, VBR Quality 90, 44 kHz, stereo 1-pass VBR, 144 kbps (vbr), 2 channels (stereo), 44.1 kHz, 16 bits/sample, wma, compression ratio: 0.104. 30.Mar 2010: Janacek_SQ2M1_5_1_100329a.wma Duration: 5:29. Filesize: 7.3 MB Codec: Windows Media Audio 10 Professional, VBR Quality 90, 44 kHz, 5.1 channel 16 bit 1-pass VBR, 224 kbps (vbr), 6 channels, 44.1 kHz, 16 bits/sample, wma, compression ratio: 0.054. 5.1 surround 30.Mar 2010: Janacek_SQ2M1_5_1_100329.wma Duration: 5:34. Filesize: 7.3 MB Codec: Windows Media Audio 10 Professional, VBR Quality 90, 44 kHz, 5.1 channel 16 bit 1-pass VBR, 224 kbps (vbr), 6 channels, 44.1 kHz, 16 bits/sample, wma, compression ratio: 0.054. surroun 5.1 30.Mar 2010: Janacek_SQ2M1_100329.wma Duration: 5:34. Filesize: 4.7 MB Codec: Windows Media Audio 9.2, VBR Quality 90, 44 kHz, stereo 1-pass VBR, 142 kbps (vbr), 2 channels (stereo), 44.1 kHz, 16 bits/sample, wma, compression ratio: 0.103. 12.Apr 2001: Janacek_SQ2M1_010412.mp3  Duration: 5:31. Filesize: 5.1 MB Codec: mp3, CBR128, 125 kbps (cbr), 2 channels (stereo), 44.1 kHz, compression ratio: 0.091. |
