Free Music

These sound files are encoded using the Xiph Ogg Vorbis codec, a superior alternative to the ubiquitous MP3 format. Current versions of Winamp and Sonique support Ogg Vorbis.

Sugar in the Gourd  (404K, application/x-ogg 2003-01-28)

The start is rough (Well, frankly, the middle and end are rough too), but I don't often have the opportunity to get new tracks recorded and it's been way too long since the last one went up, so here it is.

Oh Susanna  (699K, application/x-ogg 2002-12-30)

While arguably a cliché in terms of the banjo, it remains a pretty tune and a fun one to play.

Cripple Creek  (701K, application/x-ogg 2002-11-24)

The first song I learned to play, and as such probably the one I can play best.

Cindy  (742K, application/x-ogg 2002-12-23)

Fans of Richard Hefner's EZFolk.com web site will recognize this arrangement.

Cumberland Gap  (919K, application/x-ogg 2002-11-25)

Another arrangement by Richard Hefner.

Clawhammer Banjo

I've been playing clawhammer style banjo (also known as frailing) since July of 2002, after a lifetime of curiosity. Having played guitar for a number of years in high school and college, I found frailing to be quite a bit easier than I anticipated. I've also found the banjo much more enjoyable to play than electric guitar, if for no other reason than that you don't need an amplifier and accompanying band to properly enjoy the sound of your own playing; banjo is much more condusive to sitting on the porch and picking away an afternoon than electric guitar. I play every day, not out of dogged obedience to any self-prescribed practice regimen but out of sheer enjoyment.

I purchased a few introductory lessons along with my first banjo, but those were over by mid-August and I've been relying on a couple of books and the wealth of instructional information available online. I never would have picked the instrument up as quickly as I have if not for the tablature and recordings people have so generously made available for free, and I hope I can contribute something back to the online banjo community with some tracks of my own.

I'm no virtuoso, and sound quality is less than stellar (these tracks were recorded using a cheap Packard-Bell voice microphone that came with a PC from 1996), but it's better than nothing.

Why Ogg Vorbis?

The overwhelming popularity of MP3 stems from its high quality to filesize ratio; music encoded with MP3 can be shared in seconds over high speed connections, and hundreds of hours of music can fit on a hard drive.

However, the company that owns the patent on MP3 technology, Fraunhofer labs, currently charges quite a bit of money for the use of the MP3 encoding algorithm. Most home users are currently unaffected by this licensing fee, because it's the software vendor who has to pay it. If your CD burner came with a copy of a program such as MusicMatch Jukebox, you can legitimately rip all the MP3s you want, since you have a license to use that software, which in turn has a legitimate license to distribute the MP3 encoder. For a more lucid breakdown, see this article on Forbes.com

However, if you use one of the numerous free or open-source MP3 encoding programs out there, you may be making your MP3 files illegally; if the software developers don't have a license to distribute the MP3 encoder, Fraunhofer could technically take legal action against you.

Is that likely to happen? Probably not... but I'm of the mind that the potential greed of patent-holders is never to be underestimated. A similar situation arose a few years ago when Unisys, years after the GIF file format had become ubiquitous on Compuserver and then the world wide web, decided to begin charging software developers for the use of the LZW compression algorithm used by the GIF format... the end result was that many smaller developers had no choice but to drop support for the GIF format from their software altogether. Fortunately, the PNG (Portable Network Graphic) format provides a ready subsitute for indexed color graphics, and because the PNG specification is wide open there's no worry of somebody popping up in 10 years, brandishing a patent and demanding money for a technology they allowed to become a de facto standard for free years earlier.

Ogg Vorbis is to MP3 as PNG is to GIF; it's an open technology not bound to any patented algorithms, so adopters needn't worry about so-called "submarine patents" ruining the party down the road.

Ideology aside, Ogg Vorbis sounds better, too. One attractive feature of Ogg is that it uses variable bitrate encoding based on the amount of information in the audio being encoded, which means that Ogg files wind up being smaller than MP3 files of the same quality. A good example of this would be one of those clever CDs with an unlisted track, which is hidden by adding it to the last track on the disc along with a few minutes of complete silence, effectively making a single, 12 minute track instead of two 3 or 4 minute tracks. When using the MP3 algorithm, you have no choice but to encode those few minutes of silence at 128K, even though there's no audio information to be preserved. Ogg Vorbis, on the other hand, is intelligent enough to encode the silent portion at a very low bitrate, resulting in a considerably smaller file size. The long and short of it is, Ogg Vorbis gives you the same sound quality as MP3 in less space, or better quality in the same space.