back to article Voyager's Golden Record now free to download

When NASA launched the two Voyager probes in 1977, it knew that they were on a one-way journey into the galaxy. So on the off chance they encountered another sentient species, NASA equipped both with a golden record full of information about Earth. When we say record, think vinyl, grooves in a disk and the need for a stylus to …

  1. JeffyPoooh
    Pint

    Here...

    https://soundcloud.com/nasa

    1. Barry Rueger

      Re: Here...

      Thank you! My thought exactly - why the hell do you write an article like this and not add the link to the darned page??

  2. JeffyPoooh
    Pint

    "...all..." ?

    "NASA has now dumped all of the Golden Record's contents to SoundCloud for your listening and downloading pleasure."

    All, except all the music. It seems to be just the greetings, audio clips, and noises. As far as I can see, none of the Voyager's Golden Record music is included. Please correct me if I've overlooked it.

    We can send a spaceship to the edge of the solar system and beyond, but we can't avoid the copyright lawyers.

    1. Turtle

      @JeffyPoooh

      "We can send a spaceship to the edge of the solar system and beyond, but we can't avoid the copyright lawyers."

      So your idea is that, if Carl Sagan picks some music to be put on a disk and sent into deep space, then the rightsholders to that music somehow forfeit their rights here on earth? How does that work, exactly?

      1. Dan 55 Silver badge
        Trollface

        Re: @JeffyPoooh

        That's not the question. The questions are does Voyager have rights for each area of deep space it passes through, is there a reliable way of generating audience figures that a fair fee for radio broadcasts can be determined, and finally can pressure be bought to bear on the Kuiper Belt so they set up a collection agency or should they be put on the "they do not respect our intellectual property" shitlist?

        1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

          Re: @JeffyPoooh

          "a fair fee for radio broadcasts"

          It's American and American law applies everywhere and they don't pay royalties on tunes broadcast on the radio.

      2. JeffyPoooh
        Pint

        Re: @JeffyPoooh

        Hey! Ahem... 'Are you a Turtle?'

        No. My idea was not to abuse the word "all".

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Alien

    Take me to your lawyer

    Looking at the list of songs, its not all classical music, so I doubt it will be all released, as some of it is 'popular' stuff.

    Is this an universal attempt at takeover by copyright? If any aliens find it, Sony will be all over them!

    1. Mark 85

      Re: Take me to your lawyer

      Time then to give some serious thought to shipping all the lawyers out in Voyager's path.... just in case the music does get listened to, of course.

      1. Graham Marsden
        Thumb Up

        Re: Take me to your lawyer

        Let's ship ALL the copyright trolls out there on a ship designated, say "B"...

  4. Winkypop Silver badge
    Alien

    Privatising the search for extraterrestrial life

    1. Send copyrighted works to the far edges of the universe

    2. Wait

    3. This could take a while

    4. Let the rights holders detect any copyright infringement *

    5. Set the copyright lawyers onto the alien scum!

    * How? Generally, they make the evidence up.

    1. VinceH

      Re: Privatising the search for extraterrestrial life

      6. Everyone on Earth profits because those particular lawyers will have to visit the alien homeworld in person, and won't be back in our (or their own) lifetime.

      1. Grikath

        Re: Privatising the search for extraterrestrial life

        and if we're lucky that civilisation will have advanced sufficiently to have come up with a, preferably terminal, solution to Lawyers.

  5. Kharkov
    Devil

    And aliens thought we didn't have any serious weapons...

    So, the aliens arrive, send greetings and land...

    And are promptly served with indictments from lawyers. 'You've got an FTL drive? No, no, that's not licensed by Earth, you'll have to stop using it immediately. We already copyrighted that when they made Star Trek. Stop flying those things. Small fast ships with guns? Sorry, we did the rights to that when they made Battlestar Galactica. Communicators that you wear? You're bang out of luck there, mate, Babylon 5 did those. Shut them down... and now let's talk about the penalty fees, and our bill of course...'

    You want proof of intelligent life in the Galaxy? None of it's tried to talk to us, and that's proof enough for me.

  6. Rene Schickbauer
    FAIL

    The interesting parts seem to be missing

    The Voyager records also included pictures. Can't seem to find the audio tracks of those.

    Would be kind of interesting at having a go at decoding those and see how hard it is.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    French snub aliens

    I think there's a problem with the French greeting. Shame we didn't have twitter back then, they'd have been all over it in seconds.

  8. hammarbtyp

    Will someone think of teh artists?

    I hope they included DRM on that disk when they sent it off. We don't want aliens profiting from illegal downloads

  9. Dr Patrick J R Harkin

    There are some great sounds on there.

    My favourite is "Dear Aliens, have you mistakenly been sold Payment Protection Insurance?"

  10. avassileva

    So, the folklore songs have copyright, uh?!

    The Bulgarian song that is included in the compilation is a folklore one. It is on youtube, as well. All of us know it and all of us love it. For you to know and feel:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lJYq6bjHTQ

    Greetings from Bulgaria to all Register readers :)

  11. EddieD

    Stylus not required

    There are severly methods of playing records that don't use a stylus - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_turntable

    1. I ain't Spartacus Gold badge
      Happy

      Re: Stylus not required

      The problem is that encounters with aliens equipped with lasers never turn out well.

      The literature is much less clear about meetings with aliens armed with good phonographic equipment though...

  12. This post has been deleted by its author

    1. Christian Berger

      Re: Why so many pulsars?

      Well communication depends on redundancy. Imagine you were an alien scholar and you'd have some idea on what those weird symbols mean. If you have only the minimum of distances, you end up with the "Dutch Bikecycle"-Problem. You can make up anything with some numbers.

      If, however you have a hypothesis on that image, and it fits more than the minimum amount of data, you have an actual theory. That's also why the information on how to read the images contains one of the test images, a circle. It helps to give redundancy as confirmation.

      1. This post has been deleted by its author

  13. Ugotta B. Kiddingme

    The sound quality

    "The sound quality's not going to give any audiophile aliens out there a reason to hotfoot it in our direction"

    I can recommend a superduper whizbang high quality cable to improve upon that.

    1. ravenviz Silver badge
      Devil

      Re: The sound quality

      I don't think that cable will be long enough!

  14. Christian Berger

    Probably because that's from their .au files

    Those files clearly used to be 8 Bit files. The actual sounds on the disks would be _much_ better. In fact previous public releases of those sounds were a lot better.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-6CvmmcG0w

  15. Zmodem

    starman movie says its 54

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