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String Quartets On the Web?
rueger writes "Lots of people love iTunes. I'm partial to emusic.com. Ubuntu comes pre-equipped for Jamendo and Magnatune. These are great for those of us hunting popular music — but where do lovers of classical music go to find new artists and albums, download music, and generally keep informed, up to date, and satisfied? As my girlfriend put it, 'I used to go to the big classical record stores downtown, but they're gone.' Where do people go to find the newest Ligeti String Quartet recording?"
How about YouTube? Seems to me that you're more likely to run into new, cutting edge stuff (or old, obscure stuff) there than on a site that is trying to sell you things. Sure, you might run into say, drunk frat boys humming an ear-bleeding rendition of "Aria on a G String" with kazoos, and the recordings are frequently poor, snippets, or abominations. But it does have the advantage of being a great place to scout stuff out. If you run across something interesting, then you can check it out for real on a more sophisticated site.
Amazon's great for CDs, but as a denizen of the world outside of the US, I find they usually don't offer the advertised downloads. You can click through the links, only to be told at the final stages of the transaction that you're out of luck.
.wav files that you can burn to CD or play directly.
But in practice, for classical music I only buy CDs anyway. Assuming they aren't badly recorded, they are pretty much always superior to the more common levels of audio compression. Classical music has a habit of exposing defects in compression much more than most "plugged-in" bands. There are some artists, however, such as Jacob Heringman who do offer their recordings as uncompressed
That doesn't mean I don't use compressed file on my iPod, I just accept that the latter is used in conditions where sound reproduction doesn't matter as much.