It's embarrassing/frustrating that not much of my music is available yet. Some of my best work is still unrecorded as it is rather difficult/expensive to play! What is most stupid (for a percussionist!) is that there is currently no drumming on any of the online recordings below...!?! My 1999 demo tape has drums aplenty but is out of print, awaiting remastering on CD. My only online drumming footage is ancient and not representative of where I'm at now. I am making steps to address all this amidst trying to make a living... Meanwhile, you can at least now see me playing piano with Jon Samsworth and friends; we hope to bring you more video projects soon.
The
newest web pages and
new photos on this website are listed separately.
The newest recordings of
my music are, with date uploaded: (+date composed) [+date recorded if different]
My recordings (and indeed most of this website) are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported Licence for free download because my music wants to be heard.
It would be nice to get some comments on what you like/dislike, and why. Obviously constructive criticism is better than just saying "I love it!" or "It sux!". Please email me your comments, so that I can better gauge what moves you and where to direct my attentions amidst my vast archives of recordings awaiting processing and uploading. Do you prefer piano pieces or electronic music or my songs? Which are your favourites? We do like to think of The Listeners.
Donations towards hosting costs are welcome if you want to show your appreciation for something you really like, but I'm afraid you can't claim money back for things you hate since there is NO WARRANTY ;-)
MP3 is a legacy audio format which, although widely used, was, up until 2017, still patent-encumbered and not Free. These patents meant I couldn't legally create MP3's even of music I owned the copyright to, so I decided that I won't be prolonging MP3 usage by including any here. Now that the patents have expired, MP3 is way out of date and people have meanwhile moved on to use better formats instead based on open standards like FLAC (uncompressed) and OGG Vorbis. Obviously just like CDs, the ever ubiquitous MP3 isn't going away tomorrow, but (apart from legacy applications) there's no point being stuck with its limitations for new music.
If your computer can't play the audio files on this website, check out Wikipedia's Help pages about OGG sound files, or the easiest option is to just install a decent media player like VLC which is Free and works on almost any operating system. And if someone bought you an iPod for Christmas, then sign this petition and ask Apple why you can't play OGGs (because they obviously want to keep you locked into their iTunes Store). Luckily solutions do exist, or other less-restricted portable media players are available.
Almost all of the music on this website was created/edited using Free Software audio tools running on Debian. A big thanks is due to all Linux Audio Developers, some of whom I sponsor with donations whenever possible. These programs rock:
© copyleft Malcolm Smith 2010-12-17 - last updated 2019-07-25