About Sasagayo
Music that belongs to everyone.
Thousands of superb classical recordings are already free — released into the public domain by orchestras and military bands, given away by performers under Creative Commons, or recorded long enough ago that their rights have expired. They are scattered across archives, poorly labelled, and hard to listen to.
Sasagayo gathers them into one calm, searchable library. Every day it works through the archives composer by composer, judges each file, and adds the good ones. You can listen without an account, save favourites, and share a recording — or a whole mix — with a single link.
Where the name comes from
“Sasagayo” is a word my daughter Alice used to sing to herself as a little girl, watching her cartoons. Nobody ever knew what it meant, but the whole family remembered it. When it came to naming this place, nothing else would do.
For my daughter Alice, who gave this place its name.
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How recordings are chosen
- Real performances only
- MIDI files, synthesised renderings, music-theory examples, and multitrack stems are rejected automatically.
- Whole pieces, not snippets
- Anything under a minute is skipped; full movements and complete works rank higher, and movements are grouped into their works.
- A licence you can rely on
- Only public domain, CC0, CC BY, and CC BY-SA recordings are published. Non-commercial or no-derivatives licences never are.
- Credit where it is due
- Performers are identified from each file's metadata, and every recording carries its attribution and a link to its source.
- Listenable quality
- Low-bitrate copies and degraded derivatives are filtered out; curated collections such as Musopen are favoured.
- A human in the loop
- Recordings scoring 60+ can go live automatically; editors review the rest and can switch to fully manual publishing.
Sources
Recordings stream directly from Wikimedia Commons and the Internet Archive's Musopen collection. Composer portraits and biographies come from Wikipedia. Each recording page links to its original file and licence, so you can always verify the rights yourself. If you believe a recording is listed in error, please get in touch and it will be removed promptly.
Contact
- Kun.li@ibm.com
- Phone
- +61 0451 856 126