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My first post

Posted: 19 Jan 2011 04:42
by Wheat Williams
Hello. I'd like to upload PDFs of the choral score with piano accompaniment of the 1871 English language edition of Johannes Brahms' German Requiem, Op. 45.

I created an account, but I have only been able to successfully upload the first two PDF files of the first two movements (of seven). The site won't let me upload any more files.

Has a restriction been placed on my account because it's the first time I've used it?

Re: My first post

Posted: 19 Jan 2011 12:02
by carlos
Hi Wheat Williams, welcome to CPDL!

I noticed that you have been able to upload a third file; in fact there's no restriction to the number of files uploaded, as long as they are in one of the acceptable formats (file extensions). We have recently upgraded the wiki software to a newer version, maybe they have introduced this restriction for new users without our knowledge.

Thank you very much for taking the time to contribute your editions!!

Re: My first post

Posted: 19 Jan 2011 12:15
by Wheat Williams
I have seven PDFs to upload and it seems to permit me to upload only one every couple of hours. This is frustrating!

I will need help editing the Wiki page entry for this composition. There is already a page but only for the German language edition. I'll post questions later!

Comment: my PDF of the full 96-page octavo-size score, at 300 dpi 1-bit black-and-white with good compression, is 12MB in size. But your system has a limit of 5MB per upload, so I segmented the PDF into 7 separate movements.

I think a 5MB per file restriction is too limiting. It might have made sense 5 or 10 years ago, but these days 12MB is not a huge file now that we have faster Internet connections and more powerful computers.

Re: My first post

Posted: 19 Jan 2011 13:42
by bobnotts
Wheat Williams wrote:I think a 5MB per file restriction is too limiting. It might have made sense 5 or 10 years ago, but these days 12MB is not a huge file now that we have faster Internet connections and more powerful computers.
I think that's a fair point and I'd invite other admins' thoughts on the subject. Perhaps we could set a limit at 10MB? I think we still need to be aware of people across the world who may have worse internet connections than the norm and encourage contributors to make their files as small as possible without compromising quality.

Another way round this is to have the limit at 10MB and allow admins no upload limit (if this is possible?) Then contributors could upload individual movements or sections (as you have done, Wheat) but also make a complete PDF available to visitors.

Re: My first post

Posted: 19 Jan 2011 15:36
by CHGiffen
Scanned PDFs - such as the present Brahms - tend to be very large indeed, which is why (in general) we have tended to discourage facsimiles in favor of PDFs produced from various music engraving programs. The PDF for an engraved complete edition of the German Requiem (with keyboard accompaniment) shouldn't be more than about 1.5MB ... or about 1/12th the size of the facsimile edition.

That said, I do think that an 8-10MB limit might be acceptable. It's not so much a question of file sizes, but rather the longer download times degrading other services (unless such downloads are given a lower priority, which of course would take even more time to download).

Re: My first post

Posted: 21 Jan 2011 20:19
by Wheat Williams
I have uploaded facsimiles of all seven movements of the English setting of Brahms' Requiem, Op. 45.

How do I go about creating and formatting a new entry for the English translation on this page?

http://www.cpdl.org/wiki/index.php/Ein_ ... _Brahms%29

Should I post this question to another section on this forum?

Re: My first post

Posted: 26 Jan 2011 16:41
by vaarky
I also support upping the limit only to 10MB. But I don't think we should up it further for 2 reasons.

Printers are limited in the size of the files they can print gracefully, and even in the US I think this lags behind what people's Internet connectivity can handle. Printing large files can sometimes take overnight on some printers, even recent ones.

Also, international users may have different situations regarding Internet speed.

Breaking a big work into multiple movements will be appreciated by people in a variety of situations.

Re: My first post

Posted: 26 Jan 2011 16:56
by Wheat Williams
You wrote: "Printers are limited in the size of the files they can print gracefully, and even in the US I think this lags behind what people's Internet connectivity can handle. Printing large files can sometimes take overnight on some printers, even recent ones."

You are wrong. This is not my experience, and I am a professional computer technical support technician and network administrator for a small business. There is no correlation between the size of the bitmap file and the printing speed. A printer will print at the same speed whether it is processing a 25MB source file or a 1MB source file. Printing out a 100-page PDF from Finale or a 100-page PDF of a bitmap scan takes the same amount of time, whether it is an inkjet printer or a laser printer or whatever.

And download and upload speeds to personal computers at home is no longer any impediment. This is 2011. I have a mid-level AT&T DSL connection, and in my professional computer support work I routinely download single files that are 500MB to 2GB in size. It doesn't take long.

Third, printing out on paper is much less important than it used to be. The whole point of PDFs is to read and study documents on the computer screen, not on paper. The use of paper is diminishing rapidly, even among musicians. Pretty soon everybody will have their scores on an iPad or similar tablet computer and will dispense with paper altogether.

Re: My first post

Posted: 26 Jan 2011 17:27
by anaigeon
Pretty soon everybody will have their scores on an iPad or similar tablet computer and will dispense with paper altogether
Pretty soon ? I'm not sure it's true.
Everybody ? I'm sure it's wrong.

Re: My first post

Posted: 28 Jan 2011 20:08
by vaarky
I'd think I'd like to live on a planet where, soon, the economics will allow every teacher to have their junior high school chorus reading off school-assigned or family-purchased tablet computers; same for that community chorus and its 30-100 members, or the choir of the little neighborhood church.

As a computer-savvy professional, you may hang out with a greater share of people more likely to share your views about computer use. Even in the US, where computer infiltration in homes is not the shabbiest compared to some other countries:
Over a third of people in the United States do not access broadband at home, and nearly the same percentage "do not use the Internet anywhere," according to a new survey released by the Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration. That's "not anywhere" as in not at home or work.no Facebook, no texting, no tweets, no e-mail, nothing. It's a six percent drop from two years ago, but still a big chunk of America. [...]
Feb 2010, http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news ... he-net.ars
Then there are aesthetic reasons. Even though I've seen a singer use a tablet in performance, I've seen that others who have tablets still opt for paper for rehearsal and performance.

Thanks for your thoughts about the printer issue. I'm researching why certain PDFs (from IMSLP, many pages--can't remember if this has been an issue printing large non-music PDFs from other sources) print very slowly on our HP Laserjet 1200, ever after they have downloaded very quickly to my desktop over our faster net connection (we have dual DSL connections DSLAM-CPE bonded). And other PDFs print quite quickly. The blinky light on the printer blinks for minutes indicating that it's getting & processing signal prior to printing the first page. If you have any ideas about what might be causing the difference besides the obvious file size difference, I'd appreciate it.

Re: My first post

Posted: 28 Jan 2011 22:53
by CHGiffen
PDFs of scans are usually rather quite large, depending upon the granularity of the source and the resolution of the scanner, and the PDF engine essentially has to print a digitized black-white image, so if the resolution is rather high (say 600dpi or even higher on modern laser and inkjet printers) the printing time can be noticeably more than that for PDFs of documents set with a word processor or a music engraving program, which uses downloaded "fonts" to represent frequently used items that appear on the printed page - and the resulting PDF file sizes are widely different, scans generating huge files versus processors/engravers generating compact files.

I regularly use a laserjet as well as two inkjets, and the time to produce a page from a scanned PDF file is noticeably longer than the time to produce a page from a PDF made from Finale (via an excellent freeware PDF generator) - and this is a tiny bit longer than printing directly to the laserjet from within Finale (this latter difference is barely noticeable for scores of several pages, while the longer time required for printing PDFs of scores scanned at high resolution is definitely noticeable). Of course, the time for printing any of these on either of my two inkjets is much longer.

Like Vaarky, I seriously doubt that widespread use of iPads or electronic book reader devices (instead of paper sheet music) for performing music will happen for a very long time ... if ever.