Free Software Song

A couple of years ago I heard Richard Stallman sing the Free Software Song on the GNU website. The rythm of the song seemed familiar in some way and after som research I realized that a lot of old Macedonian folk songs have the same rythm. Stallman wrote his own words to an old Bulgarian folk song, Sadi Moma. Since Bulgaria is a neighbouring country to Macedonia it is not surprising that the folk music is similar. Stallman calls the fenomenon of putting english computer-related words to old folk songs – Filk music.

After a while I noticed a couple of alternate versions of the song popping up. None of the alternate versions preserved the original rythm of the song so I decided to make a version of my own, with the original rythm.

Youtube compresses audio pretty hard and even worse, it is mixed down to mono. This ruins the stereo effects with the guitars panned a bit to the left and right. A higher quality version can be downloaded from here:

http://vmlinux.org/~av/albertveli-free-software-song.ogg

The software used for the recording were

• Audacity
• Hydrogen

Feel free to contact me if you want the Hydrogen and/or the Audacity files. The Hydrogen file is very small, but the Audacity file is pretty big. It contains the raw audio of all tracks which sums up to about 100Mb. My singing is not so good I’m afraid so it would be especially interesting if someone that can sing would get the Audacity files and insert a song track of their own. Another interesting experiment would be if someone would get these files and insert track(s) with traditional folk music instruments (clarinet, gajda, tupan, accordion etc).

~ av albertveli den juli 6, 2008.