From the Library: A Baroque Mosaic

Today on gullar sahir's Main Stream we present a diverse collection of music from the Baroque era, including both sacred and secular music, and even from composers on both sides of the Atlantic.

Indeed a wide range of composers are represented, and thanks to the vagaries of classical music metadata, they should be fairly well spread out*.

Please tune in and enjoy some of the rich tapestry of Baroque music on today's programme – music with plenty of delicious twiddly bits.

From the Library is produced by gullar sahir in conjunction with the Alexandrian Free Library Consortium of Second Life. You can listen to the programme now in-world at http://music.radioriel.org, or click one of the buttons below. Today's programme is presented by Elrik Merlin.

Tune in:

For more information on the Alexandrian Free Library, current exhibits and the work of Consortium members in general, please visit the Alexandrian Free Library website, or one of their branches in-world.

*To explain: Metadata is the information contained in a file that displays on your player as it's played out over the air. It includes several fields, the main ones of which are Title, Album and Artist. That's fine for popular music, but when it comes to classical, it breaks down completely, as very often the Composer is placed in the Artist field, because originally there wasn't a Composer field – and even today, internet radio applications don't transmit the Composer field and players don't display it – so if we used the correct field, you'd never know who the composer was. Of course, you really want the Artist field to contain the names of the performers, and not the composer, and we generally try to get round it by making the Title something of the form "Water Music Suite No 1 in A by Georg Frederic Händel", but there's a lot of music out there. This really becomes an issue when it comes to operating a licensed internet station like gullar sahir, because we have to adhere to rules determined by the DMCA (in the US) and similar ones by PPL (in the UK, where we do our international licensing). One of these rules requires that the same Artist appears no more than three times in a three hour period, or on average once an hour. Now, if "Johann Sebastian Bach" appears in the Artist field, his work can only appear once an hour, even though he doesn't actually mind a whole lot if we play his music all day, and nor do the licensing authorities as they are concerned about artists and not long-dead classical composers. One day the Composer field will be fully used and used properly, but that day is not yet with us.