Trombettworks software

Drumswork is a short electronic music piece composed with a professional synthesizer by Gabriele Trombetti.
You can freely download and listen to it.

If you want to distribute it you must provide a link to this website together with the file:
http://www.trombettworks.com
For example you can put the link into the ID3 tags of the MP3 file (like currently is).

Length: 1 minute 47 seconds
Size: 1.65 MB
Download Drumswork MP3 - [Fraunhofer Professional 128kbps Slow(HQ)]

Drumswork is an excellent benchmark track for comparing the quality of the various lossy encoders like the various mp3 encoders, MP3+, MP3Pro, Vorbis, AAC etc., since it's harsh and precise sounds make this track very difficult to compress. Artifacts and equalization problems appear particularly evident.

Also, this track can be useful to developers of such encoders. For this reason Drumswork is now being released in lossless version too.

Download losslessly-compressed Drumswork version
Size: 12.1 MB
Please redistribute the losslessly-compressed version in this original package only.
The package is a self extracting Windows RAR archive. To extract it on other platforms you can use the fee Unrar, available for Linux x86, FreeBSD Unix, Mac OS X and Solaris 8 Sparc. For other platforms try here.

Download the first few seconds of the track losslessly-compressed
Here are the same few seconds encoded with two of the best encoders I found: (rightclick and choose "Save As")
Fraunhofer Professional MP3 codec, 128kbps Slow (HQ) [my favorite MP3 compressor] - Decompressed version [Wav]
Vorbis 1.00 encoder, Q4.00 [actually 136kbps] [my favorite compressor] - Decompressed version [Wav]

My comment on these encoders:

The Fraunhofer in Slow(HQ) mode produces many artifacts expecially in this begnning part but the highs-mids-lows equalization better reflects the original wav than the Vorbis version. In the rest of the piece the Fraunhofer (HQ) produces acceptable artifacts and all of them appear to me as very graceful and the equalization is excellent, so I consider this the best overall sounding MP3 encoder over the Internet (this codec is being distributed with many versions of Windows) - Attention: my comment is valid only for encoding in the Slow (HQ) mode.

Vorbis is always extremely low on artifacts and produces great sounds at 30% less the bitrate of an equivalent Fraunhofer(HQ) MP3, but in this first part the highs-mid-lows equalization is too high-pitched and lacking of basses. This problem does not disappear easily by raising the bitrate, so I believe the encoder might need some further tweaking. Despite this, Vorbis remains the best music encoder I've found, and the fact it's freeware opensource makes it a kick ass.

If you need an MP3 player you can download Winamp (freeware). Also look for the Winamp plugin to decode Vorbis files.