eFlash! 2018-08

2018 AGM — Annual General Meeting / AGA 2018 — Assemblée générale annuelle

Sonus Upgrade

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The Sonus upgrade we have been discussing and planning for several years has finally been completed! It has been online since May but this is the first public announcement.

I would only like to give a brief overview of the changes, and suggest the best way to appreciate what we have done with Sonus would be for you to visit the site yourself.

• Sound quality: previously only available in MP3, files are now available in FLAC, AAC, OGG and MP3, the format automatically chosen according to the user’s browser settings and capabilities;
• Browsing by genre, etc. and via “projects” is now possible;
• A player has been implemented so that works will continue to play in the background while browsing;
• Users can set up a user account, which allows them to create playlists and mark their favourite pieces;
• Multi-channel files can now be made available (users have to download the files, they don’t play in the Sonus interface);
• Further files, such as PDFs illustrating multi-channel configuration, can be included;
• Audio files destined for Sonus can be uploaded by the users directly with their submission;
• A reporting system has been implemented that allows documentation and management of royalty payments to be made to SOCAN.

We are extremely grateful to the SOCAN Foundation, who provided one-time Special Project funding that allowed us to finally move forward on this important project. And on behalf of the CEC, I wish to extend an enormous merci!! to Jean-François Denis and the team at Diffusion i Média. We are very grateful for the generous assistance and knowledge they contributed throughout the entire process this past year with the Sonus upgrade.

At present, Sonus contains nearly 2900 works by over 1000 composers — there are 365 hours of electroacoustic, sound art, musique concrète, hardware hacking, acoustic ecology, acousmatic documentary works and more to discover. So we are very pleased to be able to invite you to visit sonus.ca and have a look — and listen! — around.

Yves Gigon
Administrative co-Director of the CEC
Montréal, 26 July 2018