The OLPC Project is using bit torrent and MiniNova to distribute 4.3GB of free sound samples, all the samples are made available under the terms of a Creative Commons license. Some of the organizations that have contributed samples are The Berklee College of Music, M-Audio, Digidesign and many others.

The OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) Project had originally released over 8.5GB of free sound samples on their Wiki - Sound Samples, probably not fully anticipating the popularity of these samples they made the error to host them as direct downloads on their server. In a two day period this week the sample pack downloads consumed up to 5TB of data per day from their server, you can read a quote below from the OLPC site.

Dear site visitors, thanks to tremendous interest in these files, we are currently moving them to more dedicated servers. We transmitted 5TB of sound sample a day for two days last week… In the meantime, v.1 of the 44kHz samples (with 80% of the files) can be downloaded via this BitTorrent tracker. You can also download the collections from their creator’s pages on the Internet Archive

This BitTorrent tracker refers to MiniNova.org which OLPC have decided to use as way of saving bandwidth, utilizing the bit torrent protocol to distribute a pack containing around half the samples is a smart move by OLPC and the direct downloads will also remain active on the wiki. Bit Torrent has proved itself time and again as the most effective method of distributing large media files over the Internet, good to see it’s now finally being accepted for that use although the copyright war will still bound to rage on in the background.

If you would like to download the samples in torrent form you can grab them from Mininova - olpc-sound-samples

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Tags | bit torrent, mininova, OLPC, sound samples