The RubeTube

After five days of continuous Wget-ing, I have finally managed to download the entire Mozart collection: 2578 songs, 7.3 GB, and 7.5 days worth of music. That is sick. That's two DVDs worth of music from a single person.

Who wants a copy?

Labels: classical music, Mozart, music, WTF

Think of the phrase "circus music". What's the first tune that comes to mind? Undoubtedly, you thought of this piece: "Entrance of the Gladiators".

Entrance of the gladiators? You don't believe me? Listen to a MIDI of the tune first. That's the one you were thinking of, right? It is the "circus music" or the "clown music" (much like Jean Reno is the "French guy").

Written by the Czech composer Julius Fučík, "Entrance of the Gladiators" was originally written as a military march. Its original title and composer has faded into obscurity as people all over the world have become accustomed to associating the tune (particularly the first third of the song) with circuses and clowns. Nobody knows what could have led to this tragedy. Rather ironic considering that Fučík (left) looks like he could have made an awesome ringmaster with that mustache of his.


The next time you hear the tune, remember the title. Entrance of the Gladiators.

Labels: circus, classical music, music

I learned about this site a few months back on digg. It has a complete collection of MP3s of all of Mozart's compositions. I'm not really a fan of Mozart or of classical music in general, but I am trying to broaden my musical horizons.

I told myself back then that I'd download all of this some day, when our broadband connection at home got fixed. Well, it's finally fixed (yahoo!). So my next problem was: how do I download all of the MP3s on the site automatically? I surely wasn't going to manually crawl the site to download every link.

Luckily, there's a tool for situations like this: Wget. Linux/Unix users are more likely to be familiar with Wget, but I'm betting that the more recent *nix adopters don't know about Wget or what it's really capable of. Most Linux distros should already have Wget, but Windows users can download the binaries here. The nice thing about Wget is that you can use it to download entires sites, i.e., create an offline mirror of everything on a site: pages, links, images, files. You can read the documentation yourself and figure out how to do this, but I'm telling you right now how to download the entire Mozart collection:

wget http://www.mozart-weltweit.de/mozart00.htm -m

The "-m" switch basically tells Wget to crawl the entire site and download everything on it. Use "wget --help" to see all the neat options that you can use with Wget. The great thing about mirroring the Mozart music site is that you also get the HTML pages which give you a nice little directory that you can use to browse the selection.

It'll take some time to get all the MP3s. I'm not even done yet and I've been downloading the whole day. Mozart is a freakishly prolific musical genius; even he would be surprised to learn how many gigabytes of music he's created. I've only downloaded 1 gig and I don't think I'm even at one-tenth of the entire collection.

The more recognizable Mozart pieces are "Symphony No. 40 (Allegro vivace)" under "Later Symphonies" and "Eine kleine Nachtmusik (Allegro)" under "Serenades for Orchestra". Happy listening (and Wget-ing)!

(Where can I find the complete Beethoven collection?)

(Addendum: After five days of continuous Wget-ing, I have finally managed to download the entire collection.)

Labels: classical music, Mozart, music, tips, Wget