A two-part question.

Taken in their entirety, approximately how many hours of music would a
series of single performances of all of Beethoven's works encompass?
(Orchestral, chamber, and solo works, inclusive. I would include the
WOo pieces in this - but not minor variations of substantially the
same work, if such exist.) An answer to within +/- five hours would
suffice for my purposes.

And (now moving to a very different realm) if this corpus of work was
encoded as a series of higher-quality computer audiio files (example: a
192kb/second MP3 using variable bit rate encoding), how many gigabytes
of storage would be required to contain it? Obviously this part of the
question doesn't depend upon Beethoven in particular, just the general
characteristics of both symphonic and chamber music as
compressed/encoded using currently available formats.

---

Clarification of Question by thatseattleguy-ga on 11 May 2005 10:33 PDT

After my own research I don't need an answer to the second part of the
question (regarding computer audio encoding), although the first part
(length of Beethoven's works) still stands at the same price.

For my purposes, it's enough to know in very rough that:

- Raw CD format (44khz, 2x16 bit channels): requires ~10 megabytes/minute of music

- Lossless compressed digital audio (eg: FLAC): achieves ~2:1
compression, so ~5 megabytes/minute of music

- High quality lossy compressed digital audio (eg: 224 kbit/second MP3
or OggVorbis): achieves at least ~6:1 compression, so ~1.6
megabytes/minute of music

Thus if the entire works of Beethoven were to require 100 hours (which
I still have no idea if that is correct), that would require 6000min x
5MB/min = 30GB with lossless compression, or 6000min x 1.6MB/min =
9.6GB with high-quality lossy compression.

I supposedly (according to an expert friend) had the entire works in 7
or 8 gigabytes in FLAC format.  In MP3, the works would probably need
a gig or so.

I have the entire Bach discography in digital format, and trust me -
it's larger than 1 or 2 GB.  I know it's the full discography b/c it
took me nearly 5 years to collect.  In total, it's 35GB.  This
includes all the cantatas, chamber works, orchestral works, organ
works, guitar and lute works, operas, etc.  Encoding is 192k on
average, but more around 224k.

At any rate, the total time for every single work that Beethoven
composed is 402 hours, 10 minutes, and 13 seconds.

I hope this helps.

Sorry.  I completely screwed up and thought you were talking about
Bach - I put Beethoven in there which is even more confusing.  Let me
correct the post by saying I was talking about Bach, previously.

The details of BEETHOVEN ARE BELOW:

IN total, his work encompasses around 6.84GB around 192kbps (total discography).

TOTAL TIME (Beethoven): 99 hours, 25 minutes, 58 seconds.

Transgenicboy, thanks. I'm amazed my seat-of-the-pants estimate of 100
hours was so on. It also sounds like my estimates for compression
ratios are pretty accurate as well (I said 9.6GB for 224kbs, and you
have 6.8 for 192kbs, which sounds just about right).

Pretty cool to know that Bach wrote 4x the music Beethoven did, btw.
But which set  would you rather have on a desert island? :)

Finally...what I would give for a fast DVD burner and access to your
computer for an hour or two. :)x2

cheers /jdr/