Keltoi

The Seattle group "Keltoi" ("keltoi" is the Greek word for "celts") have recently recorded their first album, titled "Drunk With Autumn".

Keltoi consists of instrumentalists Elisabeth Alexander, Ron Rutherford, Terry Wergeland, and Bill Woods; and singer Rich Hill. Incidentally, Rich teaches a beginning class in Scottish Gaelic here in Seattle.

The recording contains several English language and instrumental selections, but half the album is Scottish Gaelic singing by Rich, backed up by the group.

More information about the recording can be obtained from:

Hand Pict Records
P.O. Box 17147
Seattle, WA 98107 USA

With permission from the group, I have sampled one cut from the album in Sun SPARCStation and Macintosh formats, and placed the files on the Internet at yeats.csufresno.edu and sunsite.unc.edu. The cut is an arrangement of the two songs "Tha Mi Fo Chu\ram" and "'S Gann Gun Dirich Mi Chaoidh". It is approximately 6 minutes.

Please note that the low sample rate, necessary to keep these files to a manageable size, causes the music to sound a bit "muffled" compared to the original CD.

The Sun file is the standard SPARCStation audio format, 8 kHz mu-law encoded. The file is called "keltoi.au" and is 2.8 Mb in size.

The Macintosh file is a 'snd ' resource sampled at 11 kHz. I have compressed the file (self-extracting) and BinHex-encoded it. The file is called "keltoi11k_snd_sea.hqx" and is 4.5 Mb in size.

For those who cannot handle files of this size, I have taken just the first stanza of the song and produced a Macintosh 'snd ' resource which, in its compressed and encoded form, is 830 kb in size. The file is called "keltoi_snd_sea.hqx".

Shawn Mehan has produced a PC ".wav" format file by converting the Sun format file. (Tapadh leat, a Sheain). The PC file is "keltoi.wav".

loading and Playing:

Sun:

Use binary mode to transfer the file keltoi.au. Use the SPARC command "play" or one of the x-windows audio tools to play the file. Or use the sound features of XMosaic if available.

Macintosh:

Use text mode to transfer the file keltoi_11k_snd_sea.hqx (or the smaller keltoi.snd.sea.hqx). Use BinHex to convert to a file keltoi_11k.snd.sea (or keltoi.snd.sea). Double-click this file to automatically convert to a file keltoi_11k.snd or keltoi.snd. This is a System 7 sound file.

If you are running System 7 with about 4 Megs of free memory, just double-click the file and it will play. If you don't have that much memory or are running System 6, use a program like "SoundApp" to play the file. If using SoundApp, set the double-buffering option on. I assume Mosaic for the Mac will play these files also.

Since SoundApp is in the public domain, I have included it (as SoundApp.sea.hqx) as well. However, SoundApp does not appear to run on the older 68000 Macs (Classic, SE, Plus)).

PC:

Download the file 0_PLAYERS.txt available on sunsite anon ftp in /pub/academic/languages/gaelic/Rte/ for information on PC as well as the other formats described above.

Gary Ingle garyi@halcyon.com Seattle, WA, USA

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