IUMA Frequently Asked Questions

May 28, 1994, Version 1.5 beta, plain text

This is an attempt to answer many common quesions about the Internet Underground Music Archive. If you still have questions after reviewing this file, email info@iuma.com or by phone or land:

IUMA

Attn: J. Patterson

217 Highland Ave, Suite #3

Santa Cruz, CA 95060 USA

(408) 426-4862

General Questions:

G1: Why have an archive of music on the Internet?
G2: Who submits music to the IUMA?
G3: How large is the archive and how many people use it?
G4: How does the artist/band get paid for their music?
G5: What does this mean for the music industry?
G6: Why is this free?

Submission Questions:

S1: Why should I submit a song to the IUMA?
S2: How do I submit a song to the IUMA?
S3: What are the legal issues surrounding this? They sound hairy.

Technical Questions:

T1: What is MPEG compression?
T2: What's going to happen to my demo tape if I send it to you?
T3: Is there a MPEG audio player for my system?: T3a: Microsoft Windows; T3b: Macintosh; T3c: Workstations
T4: Is there a MPEG audio encoder for my system?: T4a: Microsoft Windows; T4b: Macintosh; T4c: Workstations
T5: What compression ratios are possible with MPEG?
T6: Which MIME type is an .MP2 file?

ANSWERS TO GENERAL QUESTIONS

G1: Why have an archive of music on the Internet?

If you put your music on the net it will be available to approximately 20 million of the most 'connected' people in the world. Many of them spend a lot of time listening to and discussing music. There are more than 100 public discussion USENET newsgroups and mailing lists relating to music (not counting alt.icelandic.waif.bjork.bjork.bjork).

A major university site carries lyrics, pictures, playlists, reviews, magazine reprints and lists of mailing lists such as the Indie-List, the Blue-Eyed-Pop (Bjork and her ex-band The Sugarcubes) UK-dance, SF (San Francisco) Raves, and, without hesitation, more. The tastes of Internauts are the likely most diverse, eccelctic, and passionately held of any community you're likely to hang with.

Any music including yours can find a receptive audience on the Internet.

G2: Who submits music to the IUMA?

All kinds of people submit all kinds of music. We have everything from traditional folk to indie rock to instrumental jazz to japanese experimental noise -- an that's just within our first 25 submissions. One thing they do share is a love of music, belief in their talent and a refusal to be unheard and unnoticed whether or not they have major commercial potential.

G3: How does the artist/band get paid for their music?

At this time we're making only a single song available per band, so like radio, IUMA mostly a means for tremendous exposure. But IUMA is not limited to exposure only, we encourage bands to offer demo tapes in their textfile and will soon offer ways for listeners to patronize bands and buy demos directly from IUMA (if the band chooses to). We cannot guarantee anything, but we believe IUMA is a working protoype of how many people will buy recorded music in the future.

G4: What does this mean for the music industry?

From "The Music Technology Magazine," a British publication), Feb 1994, from the article HYPERinterACTIVE, Thomas Dolby speaking:

"Given that artists are already designeing their own record covers, doing their own music videos, marketing themselves and making the music, why do we need record companies? We've got machines at home capable of making master recordings, and having finished a master I can telephone it into a central server and my fans can have access to it by dialing it up on their interactive TV screens. What exactly is the record company's contribution, other than being a bank stupid enough to loan money to musicians?"

Thomas is right on the mark (his faith in interactive music is a bit loopy though).

IUMA shows that anyone can get exposure without resorting to the canonical forms of pop marketing. We don't expect this to change much in the realm of mass-market commercial music, but that's not what we're here for. The IUMA is here to bring eclectic, home-grown, otherwise possibly unknown music to the world at large.

Think of IUMA as a worldwide coffeehouse where anyone can take the stage or visit your table.

G5: Why is this free?

IUMA is a labor of love, run by people dedicated to the worldwide distribution of otherwise obscure bands and artists.

Donations are very, very acceptable, of course. Donations pay for not only the digitizing, compressing, scanning and typing, but also for the maintanence and management of the IUMA as a whole. You can safely assume that we spend about an hour to process, upload, and archive your song, artwork and textfile. Typical donations are from US$20 to US$75. Foreign currency is encouraged as it would be interesting. Checks should be payable to IUMA and are not tax-deductible.

ANSWERS to Submission Questions:

S1: Why should I submit a song to the IUMA?

See Answer G1. In short, what we offer is worldwide electronic distribution across one of the fastest-growing media in the Networked world, namely the World-Wide Web (access to the IUMA archives is also available via older standards, ftp and gopher, but the Web is the coolest and preferred way to get in).

S2: How do I submit a song to the IUMA?

Grab a copy of our latest Submission Information from our site. By mail or FAX, call us at (408) 426-4862. That's (408) I-AM-IUMA.

S3: What are the legal issues surrounding this? They sound hairy.

Here's our official policy:

     COPYRIGHTS AND DISCLAIMERS
     IUMA MUSIC LISTENERS -- PLEASE NOTE
     IF YOU ARE CONSIDERING GETTING MUSIC FROM THE NET:

     Unless otherwise noted, all sound recordings and other artistic works
     available from IUMA are copyrighted by their respective authors and
     performers. These recordings and other works are transmitted to you
     for your non-commercial home use only, and by using this service you
     agree to these terms.

     All public performance, copying, or other use of these recordings or
     works, including the music and lyrics thereof, and expressly including
     sampling and the creation of compilations or derivations of the
     recordings or works, is prohibited.

     U.S. and other copyright laws can be enforced, subjecting violators to
     substantial civil penalties and/or criminal prosecution.

     Radio broadcasters and others requiring copyright clearance
     information should refer to the accompanying permissions file for
     information on contacting the authors/performers or their agents.

What this really means is that any music on the IUMA is freely distributable _only_ in its native form and _only_ for no cost unless we, the IUMA staff leaders, give written permission. This prevents the potential problem of one day finding your song on an audio CD without the being paid while allowing the inclusion of your song on a computer CD-ROM or on a "mirror site" (a Internet site that maintains a copy of the IUMA site) for further distribution or archival purposes.

ANSWERS to Technical Questions:

T1: What is MPEG compression?

To lift directly from the MPEG FAQ (available from IUMA and elsewhere).

   > Written by Mark Adler .  
   >
   > Q. What is MPEG?  
   >
   > A. MPEG is a group of people that meet under ISO (the International
   >    Standards Organization) to generate standards for digital video
   >    (sequences of images in time) and audio compression.  In particular,
   >    they define a compressed bit stream, which implicitly defines a
   >    decompressor.  However, the compression algorithms are up to the
   >    individual manufacturers, and that is where proprietary advantage
   >    is obtained within the scope of a publicly available international
   >    standard.  MPEG meets roughly four times a year for roughly a week
   >    each time.  In between meetings, a great deal of work is done by
   >    the members, so it doesn't all happen at the meetings.  The work
   >    is organized and planned at the meetings.  
   >
   > Q. So what does MPEG stand for? 
   >
   > A. Moving Pictures Experts Group.

So you ask:
What do you need a motion pictures group for? Because they don't just research pictures and their compression, but its audio and its compression.

   > Q. You didn't mention anything about the audio compression.  
   >
   > A. Oh, right. Well, I don't know as much about the audio compression. 
   >    Basically they use very carefully developed psychoacoustic models
   >    derived from experiments with the best obtainable listeners to
   >    pick out pieces of the sound that you can't hear.  There are what
   >    are called "masking" effects where, for example, a large component
   >    at one frequency will prevent you from hearing lower energy parts
   >    at nearby frequencies, where the relative energy vs. frequency
   >    that is masked is described by some empirical curve.  There are
   >    similar temporal masking effects, as well as some more complicated
   >    interactions where a temporal effect can unmask a frequency, and
   >    vice-versa. 
   >   
   >    The sound is broken up into spectral chunks with a hybrid scheme
   >    that combines sine transforms with subband transforms, and the
   >    psychoacoustic model written in terms of those chunks.  Whatever
   >    can be removed or reduced in precision is, and the remainder is
   >    sent.  It's a little more complicated than that, since the bits
   >    have to be allocated across the bands.  And, of course, what is
   >    sent is entropy coded.

Does that answer your question?

T2: Not really. What's going to happen to my demo-tape if I send it to you?

Using an Antex Electronics SX25 professional audio digitizing and compression board we record your music to disk. Music recorded at at Compact Disc quality takes up 10 megabytes (MBs) per minute. So if a song is five minutes long, it occupies 50MBs of disk space -- that's more than most people have to spare, much less want to transfer over the net, so we compress it as we record ot using the MPEG compression techniques described above. This is the same technology that is used in VideoCD format, and very similar to that found in Sony MiniDiscs (MD) and Phillips Digital Compact Cassette (DCC) formats.

To quote the MPEG Frequently Asked Questions textfile again:

   > Q. So how much does it compress?  
   >
   > A. As I mentioned before, audio CD data rates are about 1.5 Mbits/s. 
   >    You can compress the same stereo program down to 256 Kbits/s with
   >    no loss in discernible quality.  (So they say.  For the most part
   >    it's true, but every once in a while a weird thing might happen
   >    that you'll notice.  However the effect is very small, and it takes
   >    a listener trained to notice these particular types of effects.)
   >    That's about 6:1 compression.

We've found that up to 11:1 or 13.7:1 compression on demo tapes is acceptable quality-wise as the quality of the original is already limited.

Now your probably asking:
You mean that the audio quality is sacrificed for disk space?

Yes and no. CD quality sound is not available online yet. I just takes up too much disk space and bandwidth. Cassette or FM radio quality is possible through MPEG audio compression. A computer with the latest generation of MPEG sound and video cards can even playback near CD quality from the same compressed files. You can grab a few demos from IUMA and judge for yourself.

T3: Is there a MPEG audio player for my system?

You'll need to set your Web browser (probably NCSA Mosaic) to recognize MPEG audio files as the MIME type audio/x-mpeg. The filename extension for MPEG audio files is .MP2 or .mp2. For example, NCSA Mosiac for Windows should have the following lines in the mosaic.ini file kept in the Windows directory:

      [viewers]
      TYPE9="audio/x-mpeg"
      audio/x-mpeg="c:\mosaic\utils\xing_ply.exe %ls"

      [suffixes]
      audio/x-mpeg=.mp2,.MP2

T3a: Microsoft Windows

Use XingSound Player for Windows as mpgaudio.zip available from the IUMA site. You may also need the file msnd_e24.dll if you have problems. You must already have a soundcard and Windows sound drivers installed for the player to work.

T3b: Macintosh

At this moment, Macintosh players are not available. We know of two that are in the works (both of which we are beta testing) that will be available in the near future. Email info@iuma.com to kept updated on their imminent arrival.

T3c: Workstations

Use Tobias Bading's MPEG audio player source as maplay.tar.Z or a Sun 4.x binary as maplay-sunos-4.1. People using this on UNIX workstations (particularly Suns) should look online for addition tips and scripts.

T4: Is there a MPEG audio encoder for my system?

Probably.

T4a: Microsoft Windows

Antex Electronics sells a few different hardware solutions. [Antex's email/phone#/address?]. Xing Technologies sells "XingSound for Windows" for US$99. Contact xing@xingtech.com or 1540 W. Branch St., Arroyo Grande, CA 93420, (800) 294-6448, FAX (805) 473-0147.

T4b: Macintosh

Look for the latest alpha releases of G.T. Warner's Macintosh software-only encoder/decoder on IUMA. We haven't had too much success with them but they are being developed.

T4c: Workstations

Tobias Bading's maplay for UNIX does both encoding and decoding. Source is available on IUMA.

T5: What compression ratios are possible with MPEG?

Everything from "vitrually" CD-quality at a compression level of 6:1 to the rather warbled sounding 20:1 compression. The fact that one can scale the compression to whatever suits the material is a great option for potential encoders. Its one of the main reasons we use MPEG over other open audio compression algorithms such as ADPCM.

T6: Which MIME type is an .MP2 file?

audio/x-mpeg. Adjust your MIME settings properly.

If we've failed to answer your question, please email us at info@iuma.com. And look for the next IUMA FAQ, frequently updated to answer frequently asked questions.