... and darkness came by Various

By Michael Lavorgna • Posted: Dec 11, 2012

Head on over to Headphone Commute's Bandcamp page and pick up ... and darkness came a wonderful collection of music from 87 musicians to support the victims of Hurricane Sandy.

100% of all the proceeds generated from the sale of this album will be donated towards two charitable organizations: Doctors Without Borders and The Humane Society. The artists on the release have been hand-picked to showcase the world's top talent in ambient, modern classical, and experimental music. The unprecedented selection features many unreleased pieces composed exclusively for the cause.

Nearly 400 minutes of music available as a FLAC download including work from Ólafur Arnalds, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Machinefabriek, Max Richter, Hauschka, and many more for $10 and there's a special treat in store—Stereophile's Stephen Mejias' electronic duo Floods has contributed a lovely track!

<a href="http://headphonecommute.bandcamp.com/album/and-darkness-came">... and darkness came by Various</a>

Comments

snagged it, thanks

Submitted by deckeda on December 11, 2012 - 10:10pm.

Because it was smaller than the FLAC option I presumed the ALAC was all 16/44.1 and the FLAC was all hi res. I downloaded both to see, and was wrong on both accounts.

The FLAC consists of this assortment of songs:

1) 24/96

8) 24/48

34) 24/44.1

44) 16/44.1

The ALAC consists of this assortment of songs:

9) 16/48

78) 16/44.1

So all of the 24-bit songs were converted to 16 bit and the lone 96kHz file got a power-of-two sample rate truncation. Fair enough.

It's worth noting the Lavf encoder (based on ffmpeg?) used to create the ALAC files was set to 0 compression, which means they could have all just been AIFF with "no" relative file size penalty. This was discovered by noticing the bit rates --- all 1411kbps for the 16/44.1s and 1535kbps for the 16/48s, same as if they'd been AIFFs. I took one of the supplied ALACs, made my own ALAC from it and the file size shrank to 1/3.

Thank you!

Submitted by Michael Lavorgna on December 12, 2012 - 10:24am.

For that additional and useful information.