A quiet obsession with fidelity, pressed since 2012.
FreeMultimediaSource began as a listening club inside a record shop on Gumpendorfer Straße. A decade later it is a digital library preserving the work of more than fifteen thousand independent artists — most of whom will never trend on a mainstream platform.
From a listening club to a national archive.
In 2012, Sebastian Maier and a handful of engineering students from TU Wien began recording small acoustic sessions in borrowed cellars across the Josefstadt district. They believed the recordings deserved more than a lossy stream and a forgotten URL — they deserved an archive shaped with the same care as the performance itself.
Today that archive spans 2 million high-resolution tracks in uncompressed formats, hand-tagged with session context, gear lists and provenance notes. Every release is vetted by at least two resident curators before joining the public library.
"Austria's musical tradition is a conversation between centuries. Our role is to make sure the contemporary voices in that conversation are not lost to compression."
Our editorial principles.
- Independence first. We never accept payment for editorial placement. Curation fees are publicly disclosed.
- Transparent provenance. Every track lists its engineer, venue and the gear chain used to record it.
- Lossless by default. Submissions below 24-bit / 48 kHz are either re-mastered or respectfully declined.
- European publishing law. Royalty reporting is handled through AKM and compliant with EU directive 2019/790.
Where we work.
Our headquarters occupy the third floor of a heritage building at Opernring 1 in Vienna's first district, directly opposite the Staatsoper. A secondary engineering studio operates from the Rote Fabrik district in Graz, focused on preservation of regional folk archives.
The team.
FreeMultimediaSource is staffed by a small team of 23 engineers, editors and metadata archivists. Notable members include audio director Sebastian Maier, preservation lead Clara Novak, and infrastructure architect Matthias Gruber. Editorial commissions are written quarterly by guest authors from across Austria and the wider DACH region.
Secure library management, powered by Steinberg.
Our long-term preservation stack is co-engineered with Steinberg Austria. Archive operators authenticate through a single-sign-on bridge that mirrors session files, MixConsole presets and Nuendo project states to cold storage. If you manage a partner label or institutional archive, the button below is the secure entry point to your collection.
Why Vienna.
Vienna's density of concert halls, university programmes and small independent labels makes it uniquely suited to a project like ours. Within a 30-minute tram ride from our office you will find the Musikverein, the Konzerthaus, Porgy & Bess, Fluc, Grelle Forelle, and at least forty recording rooms open to independent artists on any given weekend.
We pay our taxes here, we hire locally, and we publish all annual transparency reports in both English and German.