Billy Budd, Sailor - Herman Melville

Written by Herman Melville
Read by Frank Muller
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 128 Kbps

Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative), also known as Billy Budd, Foretopman, is a novella by American writer Herman Melville, left unfinished at his death in 1891. Acclaimed by critics as a masterpiece when a hastily transcribed version was finally published in 1924, it quickly took its place as a classic second only to Moby-Dick among Melville’s works. Billy Budd is a “handsome sailor” who strikes and inadvertently kills his false accuser, Master-at-arms John Claggart. The ship’s Captain, Edward Vere, recognizes Billy’s lack of intent, but claims that the law of mutiny requires him to sentence Billy to be hanged.

Digitally Enhanced in order to fix audio recording Speed/Pitch/Tone as much as possible so that the recording sounds like the late legend, Frank Muller himself. He had many variations on his voice depending on what he was reading, so I had to try and fix the recording to match the type he was using for that book, ie fast and upbeat or low and measured, (like the difference between his reading of John Grisham legal thrillers and Stephen King and cop thrillers with mafia voices and Silence of the Lambs or Anne Rice Vampire Chronicles) and the year, as he sounded different in the early 80s than he did in late 80s and 90s and 2000s. Many recordings out there have severe audio issues which stem from the digital source which likely stems from a bad cassette transfer, which I have endeavored to fix so that Frank can be heard as he actually was. Noise, Bass/Treble etc have also been tuned, along with Audio level being normalized to -3db top end max with a maximum boost of +2.5db for lower volume areas. Audio encode frequency is 44.1KHz at 128Kbps Stereo for best quality with no compression artifacts (unless source was low quality to begin with and noise couldnt be completely removed). Many of these were very bad and I have done the best I can over 12 years working on these to restore them once I discovered Frank Muller in 2010, 2 years after he passed away. Long Live THE LEGEND