IMSLP Forums

I have found the torrent and this forum. Is there anyone out there currently seeding? or did the project get terminated?

Many Thanks
Geoff

There never was an official Torrent of the site, and because of the various copyright and licenses in play, there probably will not be one any time soon.

Also, this never was appropriate to this forum, as it was never an announcement, but rather a question. I'm going to wait a couple of days so everyone sees it, and then move it to feature requests, which is where it would be better suited.

No problem, i think its a shame about the licence and copyright issues especially for the music thats over 100 years old.

Not all the music here is 100 years old. There are more than 600 living composers who have uploaded their own works as well. This is one of the reasons you will not be seeing any authorized torrents of this site anytime soon.

I think the problem with torrents would be a) that IMSLP receives something like 1000 new files every two weeks or so (how would you keep it up to date?), and b) that - if I have access to the internet (which I would need in order to access the torrent), why would I ever choose to download a file over torrent rather than through imslp.org?

One reason might be speed (through torrents you can get incredibly high download speeds) - but I feel this is unnecessary as IMSLP files tend to be very small compared to what one usually downloads via torrents (films, music albums etc - where a high download speed does make a difference). Also, the only way a torrent would work would be if someone knew exactly what score they were looking for, by which composer, and they also knew it was available on IMSLP.

So a torrent would means losing all the browsing functionality that IMSLP offers (category walker, arrangement by genre/instrumentation, ethnicity of composer, name of arranger/editor, searching composers by alternative names, etc etc), would be out of date by thousands of scores within months of being uploaded, would cause numerous problems in terms of copyright and distribution of works released under a CC license, and would be inconvenient for anyone who doesn't know exactly what he/she is looking for.

I don't see why it would be useful at all, unless, say, a library wanted to provide an off-line version of IMSLP to its visitors, or something. It would also mean that other copy-cat websites which (already) indiscriminately download IMSLP scores and redistribute them without permission (not an issue with public domain scores, but an issue with scores which are not PD everywhere and certain contemporary scores which are released under a more strict CC or similar license) would have instant (indiscriminate) access to the IMSLP database and it could easily get out of hand. Especially if IMSLP is officially involved in something like this, it could have grave ramifications if it could be shown that by providing a torrent, IMSLP is attempting to circumvent copyright laws of various countries, which would be unpleasant for all.

Have there been any thoughts of making torrents available, not of the whole site, but of the contents of some individual pages, as is done on archive.org (I don't know how offhand the choice is made there)? (Yes, there's the same problem as above since the pages are editable, so it would only be the torrent of a snapshot, but it might still be worth doing - and for that matter even the torrents at archive.org have a disclaimer that the source may have changed in the meanwhile (though not as often as can be on our site I know) and give a link to update the contents.)