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What is the license of these files?
Suppose these were stolen from someone who established some sort of license. Then knowing that would be extremely useful.

But suppose that simply isn't the case, and somebody just created the files and let them go. Is it problematic for there to be no license? The phrasing of your question (asking what the license is, rather than asking whether there is a license) suggests possibly yes. Genuinely curious. Should things that legitimately lack a license be treated as if they have an infinitely permissive license or an infinitely restrictive license or something in between?

This is not an open question. The infinitely restrictive license is the default. Copyright rights (which include permission being required for redistribution) have been automatically granted for all creative works by default since 1978 in the US, and other countries have generally adopted compatible copyright laws.
I assumed these aren't copyrightable, based on the lack of creative work I discern in the recordings. Should've clarified that in my question.
Is this made by a US user?
I'm a US user, but if I'm understanding the Berne Convention correctly, then most countries in the world make copyright apply automatically without need for registration. Quoting the Wikipedia article on the Berne Convention [1] (disregard the citations in the quotes):

> As of November 2022, the Berne Convention has been ratified by 181 states out of 195 countries in the world, most of which are also parties to the Paris Act of 1971.[4][5]

> The Berne Convention introduced the concept that protection exists the moment a work is "fixed", that is, written or recorded on some physical medium, its author is automatically entitled to all copyrights in the work and to any derivative works, unless and until the author explicitly disclaims them or until the copyright expires. A creator need not register or "apply for" a copyright in countries adhering to the convention. It also enforces a requirement that countries recognize rights held by the citizens of all other parties to the convention.

With that said, the US does require the author to have completed the registration process before filing a lawsuit over copyright infringement [2]. I say "completed the registration process" because the US Copyright Office might refuse the registration, but the author will be entitled to sue infringers afterward regardless of the outcome.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St...

This comment is tangential to, but references, my previous comment.

I'm not a lawyer, but to my understanding, a copyrightable work is "fixed" (and can be copyrighted) the moment it is first recorded somewhere other than in someone's memory. A computer drive is a physical medium. Even if the record of the work gets destroyed, the copyright on the work continues to exist. Whoever fixes the work is the author.

It's not clear-cut, though. (Copyright is messy in general, but I digress.) Situation A: If you think of a song, never write any of it down, but sing it to me while I record you with your permission, I am the author of the recording. Am I the author of the song? I don't know, though a court might. Situation B: If you write the song down before I do, then I think you would get copyright to the song and hence exclusive rights to any recording I make of it (the recording being a derivative work). Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that in Situation B you would be able to retroactively prohibit me from distributing the recording or changing it in anyway. If you had written the song down before I started recording your singing then you would be able to prohibit me from making the recording in the first place.

In addition to copyright law, there is also a body of law called "authors' rights" (originally the French term droit d’auteur). Authors' rights have overlap with copyright but apply in additional situations and give authors additional... rights. Authors' rights apply to unrecorded performances, not just to fixed works [1]. In the previous paragraph, you would have authors' rights in both situation A and situation B.

There is also a body of law distinct from copyright law called moral rights. The Berne Convention establishes moral rights in Article 6bis [2]:

> Independently of the author's economic rights, and even after the transfer of the said rights, the author shall have the right to claim authorship of the work and to object to any distortion, mutilation or other modification of, or other derogatory action in relation to, the said work, which would be prejudicial to his honor or reputation.

My very US-centric opinion upcoming: The non-physical components of copyrightable works are both non-scarce [3] and non-rival [4]. In my opinion, anything related to non-scarce, non-rival works should not be restricted in copyright-like ways except as a matter of ensuring that the makers of the works had enough financial cushion to be incentivized to make the works in the first place. Moral rights go beyond that purpose. Right of attribution is reasonable (within limits; which people should I grant attribution to if I'm making a remix of a remix of a remix of a remix of a... and so on?). Right to publish anonymously is inherently included in freedom of expression, and I really prefer that the country I live in protect freedom of expression. Right to ban "modification of"? Only as a necessary evil for financial incentivization and only as a privilege, since making a modification (which is making a remix) doesn't destroy the original work. Also, free as in speech software i.e. libre software should get a pass. Right to ban "derogatory action in relation to" is incompatible with freedom of expression.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_France#Differ...

[2] https://www.wipo.int/wipolex/en/text/283698

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_scarcity

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivalry_(economics)#Non-rivalr...

Most jurisdictions on Earth are pretty clear that no license means no ability to use whatsoever (sans special cases like fair use), so you don't have to type "all rights reserved" - it's the default. Sometimes the act of sharing with intention for others to use creates an implicit license though, but the extent of such license depends on particular country's laws.
You don’t need to “establish a license” to receive copyright protection in most jurisdictions (anymore).

Unless they specifically grant a license to the general public (such as Creative Commons) or they release a work into the public domain (in countries that know the concept), the copyright is with its creator.

This only applies to copyrightable works and there are many other edge cases, though.

I assumed these aren't copyrightable, based on the lack of creative work I discern in the recordings. Should've clarified that in my question.
A license.... how quaint!
Can someone explain the purpose and use of these files?
I used a tiny SBC and a 7.1 channel USB soundcard to upgrade a 15 year old Yamaha AV 5.1 "Dolby Digital" receiver (with toslink/spdif) to handle the latest codecs. The old receiver has a "6ch input" selector that doesn't do any decoding - just takes the 6 inputs, amplifies them and sends them to the speakers. I also use the extra 2 channels from the USB 7.1 audio to a 2nd stereo amp that powers the adjoining room. (This involves pulseaudio channel mapping).

It took about 2 days to make sure that absolutely everything worked, including turning stereo into 5.1 + 2, and adding LFE to the adjoining room speakers so they didn't miss out on multichannel bass. Technically, I could map the extra channels from a 7.1 or 9.1 source into their nearest 5.1 neighbors, but I left that part disabled because I don't have any sources with that many channels.

The most tedious part of the setup was proving that each source type was supported, and all the speaker mappings were correct. Test files are extremely useful and there's no one source for all of them. I spent quite some time finding these files for myself.

Can you provide a bit more details to your setup (HE, …) - it sounds perfect and exactly what I am looking for at the moment.
I bought a MeLE quiet PC (little bigger than a pi but with case, x86, ssd, 16gb memory) and installed OpenSUSE Tumbleweed because I wanted a rolling distro. Installed kodi, mounted it on the back of a large monitor. Using a cheap Startech 7.1 USB audio on a long USB connection that takes it all the way to the Yamaha receiver. I've attached a 2TB HDD to the MeLE and that holds most of my stuff. There's a NAS in the attic too.

For the pipewire / pulseaudio channel mapping I can go into the boring details if you want

Thanks for the extra detail. I have been wanting to build a dedicated Jellyfin client for a TV for a while to avoid any 'Smart' TV festures. Does your system boot directly into Kodi? I have been wanting to build something similar for a Jellyfin player. Did you set up an IR remote as well?
Well, it boots to a KDE Plasma desktop that launches Kodi (full screen). It also starts MusicBee (windows app that runs perfectly in wine, with a few tricks). I had tried jellyfin but ditched it back when my SBC was a Raspberry pi 4. Because that sucked so much that I abandoned it, attached a large drive and used Kodi instead (ie: I don't stream, I play locally attached content). It's easy to set up a DLNA listener too, so I can fling music or movies to gmedia-resurrect. It's constantly listening in the background, and plays whatever I send to it (eg: from bubble upnp)

Oh, and I plug a Logitech Bluetooth audio receiver into the line-in on the USB 7.1 soundcard, so I can pay music from a phone or my HiBy R2 DAP.

About the Pi: it sucked for a heap of reasons. I found myself fighting stupid battles over and over. Switching to an x86 made all of those problems disappear immediately. Stay the hell away from the Pi, is my advice.

I don't have a remote actually, I use the Kodi Android remote, MusicBee Android remote and kdeconnect (for everything else).

Channel mapping from source through PC sound system to multichannel receiver.

[PCs often have idiosyncratic default channel arrangements]

And these channel arrangements can messed up if you pluging headphone/mic in one of the ports, plugin new hdmi device, or for some other reasons. If you use software for mapping surround channels (Virtualmeeter, etc) things can also break. Or channel levels can differ between front and surround channels. Or even if you’re lucky that nothing ever breaks these files are useful during initial fine tuning.
This is way more useful than people think thank you

Google products have become so user hostile at the expense of their users. I literally cannot download this folder on my phone I have to “share” each one individually. I also can’t make an actual copy of the files without downloading and uploading so they save some precious space. Must be hard for such a small company

You're right that you can't download multiple files on the phone. (Whether that's a good decision or not I don't know -- generally whenever I try sharing multiple files in iOS apps it's wonky, where apps only receive the first file and throw away the rest, so it might be a broader ecosystem problem.)

But just use your browser. Ctrl+A to select all files, hit the "Download" button, wait a minute for it to create a .zip file, and it downloads. Just tried it myself, works like a charm. (In past experience sometimes the .zip archive step fails -- if so, so just try a second time.)

> I also can’t make an actual copy of the files without downloading and uploading so they save some precious space.

If you're trying to make a copy to your own personal Drive, just select "Make a copy" from the context menu. That creates a copy (not a shortcut) in your Drive root folder, no downloading and uploading required. (In the mobile app that option appears only for individual files, but the Drive website allows you to do it for all selected files at once.) I just tried this now as well and it works perfectly.

Or if you want to save space on your Drive, you can drag them to "My Drive" (rather than explicitly making a copy) and it'll create shortcuts instead.

With the Drive app you can just select all and download
I was going to post that on the web site, you can click the title (Audio Test Files) at the top, and select Download. It will create a ZIP and off you go. But then I tried it and OP is right--it failed.
Ctrl-a will select all the files for downloading in Firefox. That's the only way I could see to grab them all at once.

You will end up receiving three .zip files that unpack to about 5 GB total.

Worked fine for me in desktop Safari... shockingly enough.
Google Drive is so rife with fraud and BS. First off, if you upload stuff to someone else's Drive, it counts against YOURS.

Second, there's actually no way to let someone upload stuff to your drive. I needed a bunch of video footage from someone else's phone, but she couldn't upload it even though I gave her a link to a folder... because she doesn't have her own Drive. So BS #2 is to support BS #1.

I don't remember if Google double-counts stuff "shared" with you, against your Drive and the sharer's. But I wouldn't put it past them.

Unfortunately DropBox doesn't offer competitive capacity/price combos, and even worse they outright lose files. They lost an entire video job I uploaded for a client; gigabytes of files just disappeared for several days, and when they finally responded to inquiries they had no explanation. I had to sign up for Google just to get the job delivered (late).

http://ohnodomo.duckdns.org/hosted/sharex/Audio%20Test%20Fil...

I've downloaded them and created a mirror for anyone else having issues.

I don't get one thing - why would devalue your submission by typing "every" when it's clearly not true?
What a strange thing to be condescending about.
Nobody's condescending here (except you, perhaps). I don't know much about audio formats myself, I clicked because I got curious of "every audio format", but got a pretty basic set of the most popular formats instead that's missing some formats that even a dummy like me knows that exist, so I'm genuinely curious why would someone add a completely unnecessary and confusing word "every" into that sentence instead of, say, "various". All it achieves is that it turns a useful submission into a lie.
True, it's weird but this is missing major formats like auro3d
https://www.audioholics.com/audio-technologies/auro-3d-bankr...

Isn't auro3d mostly dead/beta maxed?

Sure, but it's something my receiver technically support
But no-one is shipping content with these long gone formats any more. My almost 20 year old receiver supports formats that have long since fallen by the wayside as well, why put any effort into them for test and diagnostics?
Old content still exists. Also, there are still SACD releases being made in 2023 (though whether it makes sense is another matter) and DSD is nowhere to be seen in this set of files either.

That said, it's obviously impossible to include every audio format out there, so I don't expect it to do so at all. That's why I asked what's the motivation to write such thing, because it's a very weird thing to say in the first place. If it actually included some weird, exotic and outdated formats it could perhaps be excused, but apparently it doesn't even try to do that, so it really feels like clickbait.

I was bummed that it didn't include 4-bit mono ADPCM, myself. Nothing else evokes my childhood with Ma Bell quite as effectively.
Pretty sure Ogg/Vorbis supports multichannel. I don't see that there.
Some sort of CAD file for etching wax cylinders and vinyl masters would warm the smart-ass cockles of my heart.
Auro3d isn’t a major format and it’s entirely dead
Dude what
The LPCM5.1 is an M2TS file at @498MB while the LPCM7.1 is saved as WAV at only 23.2MB. That seems very strange unless the 7.1 is significantly shorter. That would be very odd decision. Seems to me that a library like this would be exactly the same audio source just saved as the different formats. Maybe I'm over thinking it, and just too OCD about making a library like this public for fear of this very type of criticism
Maybe it's the collector's goal to eventually have every one possible