You probably wondered what Asian music is like. Especially traditional Asian music. Wonder no more. You could have classical Asian music from www.asianclassicalmp3.com. The person who collected the material got the permission to convert the cassette tape recordings to mp3 files. The countries of origin are as follows: Burma, Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Korea, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam.
This site usually gives a brief description of the artists or music. Most of the time they are from out of print cassettes. Other information given on the pages would be the bitrate used in converting the files. Sometimes the files could be huge and there is a note saying that is alright to request files with lower bitrates so that they could be smaller, easier for those on dial-up. Also you could contact the webmaster for other dilemmas you might have with the file downloads.
The files are sometimes long, like almost half an hour in length. In the case of the Cantonese opera files, each of them would be around 15 minutes long. It is just to give you a hint of what it is like. Other musical instruments featured on this site include Vietnam’s dan tranh, a stringed instrument similar to China’s gu-zheng.
These recordings would be interesting for use in Asian studies classes as well as for the purpose of going back to one’s heritage, if of Asian descent, that is.
Note: As mentioned earlier in the blog entry, most of these have the permission to be shared on the Internet. In case you find out that there are tracks that have some copyright issues, kindly email the webmaster.