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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?"
iTunes carries a pretty good classical catalog for a casual listener as myself. If you can't find what you want online maybe you could contact the artists/label directly? I can only imagine the website sells the cds if they aren't selling digitally through another outlet.
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Amazon MP3 Downloads?
Jamendo and Magnatune are great for finding popular music?
Seeing as I'm pressed to find any Top 40 tracks on either website, I would say that they're good for finding obscure music.
(And so we're staying on topic here: I can find tons of classical music on Magnatune. String Quartets aren't out-of-mainstream enough for Magnatune or what?)
Depends what you're looking for, of course. The major works are pretty well represented.
I don't know if you've ever checked out Magnatune's offerings or not, but you're a lot more likely to find what you're looking for there than you are to find anything resembling popular music.
Try eMusic. They have tons of classical, and it's probably a bit cheaper than Amazon in some cases. Although there is one annoyance - if a track is longer than a certain length, you might have to download the whole album to get it, which sucks if you already have different versions of the rest.
ie You find an album with a symphony and a overture piece, but you have the symphony already (perhaps a different group, or same group just different album). If the overture is over some length (I don't remember how much, something like 7 mins or so), you'd have to get the symphony anyway, burning 12 credits rather than just one. Before that, you could get some long symphonies (Bruckner...) for just 1 credit per movement.
You can also try ClassicalArchives.com . I used to be a member, but I let it lapse. That was before the new site though, and I've considered going back. (Before, they only had public domain performances, stuff put up by the groups themselves, etc, and a crapload of MIDI)
I'm kind of partial to Baroque and Renaissance music, especially when I have difficulty sleeping[1]. So I found some obscure corners of the web that had streaming audio and everything was as fine as Vivaldi's spring day.......until the day that my PC caught a nasty virus, probably through Windows Media Player. They didn't offer other streaming formats, so please don't suggest Linux.
If you only download MP3 files directly, things may be a little safer than streaming, but content files can contain malware also. You may be safer paying more for a reputable store. They have more to lose from an outbreak, and are thus more likely to scrub their content and respond to suspicious activity.
[1] In rough general, Rock is for waking me up, Baroque is for relaxing, and Renaissance for sleeping.
Table-ized A.I.
My classical collection has been built through the following method:
1. Get borrowing privileges at your local university library. (These are generally available to the general public for a small fee.)
2. Check out classical CDs.
3. Burn and/or rip.
If you are a student or faculty, then you also have access to interlibrary loan for the rare stuff.
Ironically I have been following this topic for a while. Today EMH Classical has launched 6 of their newest and most popular recordings as exclusive iTunes releases. A classical first.
http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/emh-classical-music/id385488162
First off, mp3 is simply not good enough for Classical. If you must buy digital, go for 320 kbps or lame alt-preset-extreme equivalent. As a giant Classical snob (I listen to Classical exclusively), the only way I buy music is physical CDs, and then rip to FLAC once it arrives.
For purchasing physical media, I enthusiastically recommend ArkivMusic. They have a pretty damn good selection, and a really good sorting method where you can browse by composer, conductor, orchestra, soloist, et al., in a very granular fashion. I too checked the local brick-n-mortar stores in Atlanta when the recent re-release of Golijov's Passion of St. Mark hit the shelves only to find no one carrying it. I ended up ordering it from ArkivMusic.
Naxos also has a pretty decent online presence. You can buy from their comprehensive catalog on their site, as well as pay a subscription fee for unlimited mp3/radio quality streaming off their site from their entire collection. While the performers on Naxos aren't always the highest quality, I'd be willing to bet that Naxos has the most comprehensive Classical catalog of any publisher on the planet. Considering the breadth of their collection, if you just want to try new music, the streaming subscription is a pretty damn good deal, poor to middling quality or not.
Interested in unknown, but accomplished classical musicians? Check out wedding musicians. My wife manages a string quartet. They play mostly weddings and events. These women all have post graduate degrees and they are excellent classical musicians. I suggest if you search wedding musicians in your area and check out their websites, you may discover some excellent classical musicians right in your backyard and they may even perform in public as themselves or as part of other groups. Almost all of them will have recordings on their websites or otherwise available.
CBC radio has a bunch of fantastic classical options, especially for those who don't know what they want and its free(unless your Canadian, in which case its tax dollars well spent).
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.
If you're just looking to explore the world of classical music, youtube is a decent place to start. There are a number of GREAT channels there with hundreds of pieces. Here are two of my favorites:
http://www.youtube.com/user/HARMONICO101
http://www.youtube.com/user/TheGravicembalo
OK, fine, I'm sure you know more about geek-related IT stuff than the poster, but how much do you really know about classical music? Not much, judging by your post. If you're looking for a recording of the Pachelbel canon and you find a recording by the Upper Slobovnia Symphony Orchestra and are happy, you are probably not qualified to post a response. While Amazon has a very good selection of CDs for purchase, their mp3 selection is much more limited. iTunes is completely worthless if you know enough to prefer certain recordings over whatever single version they have to offer. archivmusic.com has a limited mp3 selection but it may be preferable to the bigger stores and their comments are always worth reading.
And this whole post reminds me of why I really don't like slashdot these days. It's full of arrogant young dbags like yourself that comment on something they know virtually knowing about yet speak with the authority of Kernighan discussing proper C syntax. I hope you all get through puberty someday and realize your limitations.
... if you're not in the US, and you don't use a Mac or Windows PC. Amazon does not sell MP3s to Australians; iTunes is Mac/Windows only. Personally, I've had most success with emusic.com, but as the querier has noted, their range is limited.
I really miss being able to walk into a store with a large classical range, have a listen, chat with knowledgeable staff, and have the chance of a serendipitous discovery. The web can theoretically provide the equivalent and more besides, but is hobbled by overly restrictive domains and copyright paranoia.
Obviously one of *the* labels for classical music. The awesome thing about their web store is that, in addition to 320kbps MP3s, you can buy FLACs. Very appropriate for fans of classical music which are often crazy about sound quality.
I think /. is looking to compete with google, this article happens to be the second site google spits out after our friend here lmtgfy'ed it for us.
As a non-casual "classical" listener, I can heartily recommend the Naxos Music Library. This is a little different from naxos.com suggested above: naxos.com only has recordings from the Naxos label, while the NML includes many sister labels (including some great ones, like Wergo). They add about 1000 CD's every month, about 40 a day. I've rapidly expanded my knowledge of new composers, and great recordings of old composers. They have multiple recordings of the Ligeti string quartets, including the Arditti Quartet, for example. They're not cheap, though. :(
I listen to WQXR, a classic station native to New York City. Its my portal to classical music and they feature a great variety. Their website has a live stream.
I don't follow classical regularly, but emusic seemed to be well stocked. Their supply of obscure free jazz impressed.
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.
Is that whoever posed this question has never done even 10 seconds of research to answer it himself as one can easily find vast amounts of classical music online, on iTunes, Amazon, or one of the various "lesser known" stores.
I mean come on, I've downloaded several classical tracks straight from the iTunes promoted weekly single. So not only is classical available there, it's occasionally even promoted.
On top of that, every few weeks you'll see a deal on some bulk track sale on Amazon or similar stores posted to the old standby slickdeals.net site.
So really, why is this question here on slashdot? Is /. looking to compete with google by crowdsourcing search result for the most mundane and trivial bits of information out there?
This whole post was a ruse to get us to run over and watch that amateur string quartet playing. I suppose to run up the hit count. I'm thinking that a Slashdot effect on a Youtube video would all by itself create a viral video status.
to find new artists or composers if you are into 20th / 21st century classical, or fusion/m-base/post bop jazz. For classical stuff I mostly hear of new composers on the Los Angeles classic station KUSC. Sometimes I stumble onto interesting stuff on Rhaspsody.
Nice to see there are a few other folks that like left brain music. I guess we spent too many nights performing pop music in bars and want to hear something different.
How about trance music? I only have http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/list.php?which=genre&id=11&order=score&sortorder=desc&page=1 for homemade audio tunes. What about commercial trance music videos? :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
My fiancee is going to hate you. I go through periods of different genres of music. She dreads my classical kicks, and I have a feeling this thread will certainly set one off.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
HDTracks.com
No DRM
lot's of 96khz/24bit
flac/mp3/aiff
Individual tracks
Full albums
All styles of music
Very rapidly growing
New recordings
Lot's of re-releases.
We can help, but I suspect your thesis will end up three parts troll and flamebait to one part insightful!
Forget the ipod for classical. I much prefer a music player with FLAC support and a decent pair of ear canal headphones. My Sennheiser CX 270 set are nice and I've managed to listen to a quiet note with a metro (subway) screeching into the stop with no trouble.
Just.. don't wear them while driving.
http://www.passionato.com/ It's an online classical music store offering a nice catalog in both mp3 and flac. Lots of 25% off sales. But seriously, what.cd ftw.
Find yourself a proxy within the US or another market where it's offered. Of course they might check the credi card number too, so you may still be out of luck.
I've moved to australia, but only recently so I still have a uk card to use, and a friend over there with a box I can ssh into for a proxy. It's a pain, but it works.
Yeah, you can forget trying to get good current Russian music, or non-american club music on Amazon or Itunes. For club music, Dance-tunes.com is pretty awesome, and in several ways better than Itunes.
http://hyperion-records.co.uk/ http://www.theclassicalshop.net/ http://linnrecords.com/ http://www.dacapo-records.dk/ and http://www.analekta.com/ http://www.classicsonline.com/ absolutely deserves mention, but has little on flac http://www.passionato.com/ and http://www.deutschegrammophon.com/ are good, but don't provide booklets
As a student studying classical music at a conservatory I can testify to the OP's plight. You may be able to find tons of recordings on iTunes of Beethoven's 5th symphony, but you may not be able to find a recording of the Tomasi Bassoon Concerto. Also, classical musicians and listeners often don't just want any recording of a given work. A lot of the recordings you find on iTunes are done by 2nd-tier European radio symphonies. Often people look for recordings done by specific orchestras or even specific historic recordings. My teacher has collected 33 different recordings of the opening to the Rite of Spring, 17 of them conducted by Stravinsky, 2 of them are rehearsals featuring Stravinsky singing the opening bassoon solo.
If you're lucky enough to be a student at a university with a good music school, you can get access to a huge selection of lesser-marketed recordings. I'm not a copyright lawyer so I can't say if ripping them is exercising fair use under the guise of education or not. If you're in a major city, your public library is also likely to have a large selection.
If that fails and you're looking for recordings that feature some sort of instrumental solo work, a Google search for the piece may turn up a performer who's recorded it but may not be actively marketing their album. Most likely, they'd be happy to get an e-mail from someone interested in listening to their music. Some may even mail it to you for free, just excited to have some publicity. Also, most instruments have their own societies with mailing lists. For example, bassoonists are part of the International Double Reed Society. A question to the society about where to find a recording may yield positive results. Also if you're having trouble finding something, there's a good chance other members of the society are too.
If you're looking for works by an obscure living composer, e-mailing the composer can be an option. Casually asking William Bolcom or John Williams for their music is an exercise in futility, but a lot of composers are struggling to get recognition. If their piece doesn't have a studio recording, chances are they made a recording of one of the performances for their records and would be happy to send it your way.
A last resort would be the Naxos Music Library. A lot of universities have subscriptions to the online database. It can be hard to find the portal on the university's website to connect to it however. If you're not a student, then it's only available with a subscription fee for streaming classical music. They have an incredible selection, however.
Finally, if you've ascertained with complete certainty that there exists no recording at all of the piece and it means that much to you...COMMISSION ONE! I'm dead serious. As a music student I can testify that there are oodles of young, talented classical musicians out there who'd love to take on a project such as that. If you live near a good music school, that's where I'd start. Faculty are a good place to ask about putting together a project as they can help with recruiting. Generally they'll pass on your offer to their students and other relevant faculty, provided you make your case well why this given piece should be recorded. Students may do this for free, but you're more likely to get the creme of the school if you offer to pay them. Music students will play on the (relative) cheap. Figure a bare minimum of $15-20 a service per musician plus $5 for every hour that service lasts past the first hour. You can reduce that with the promise of food.
In summary, finding classical music isn't necessarily easy, particularly if you want to be particular about it. However, it is possible provided you're willing to be outgoing and connect with the community.
if I only had a brain....
France Musique.
They have exactly what I'm looking for, with lots of not-necessarily-on-the-shelf, mostly classical music
http://mp3.live.tv-radio.com/francemusique/all/francemusique-32k.mp3
There is also a high-quality stream; but my place of work has a lousy connection, and so has my ISP.
YMMV
I'm a big fan of KUSC (http://www.kusc.org), particularly their evening show. Jim Svejda does some pretty obscure stuff at times, and I find his interviews and commentary particularly insightful. Too bad he's on so late on east coast time. Also for really avant-garde stuff, there's John Schaefer's New Sounds on WQXR (turned me onto minimalism back in the early 80s.)
But at home, I've ripped my CD collection and stream via iTunes, Airport Express/AirTunes and an FM transmitter with enough power to reach the entire house and yard. I'm into Early Music and about half my stuff is Medieval or Renaissance. There's nothing like Krummhorns in the Morning :-)
Wow, your post made me go over and actually look at it. It's awful. Certainly the music is creative and sharp, and the performers skilled, but it is highly unmotivated, drained of emotion, and not worth the effort it takes to actually understand it. What a waste (and please, before you mod me troll, take a second to actually listen to the music in the link. I think my assessment is accurate).
Qxe4
Not sure why no one has suggested the obvious best venue: Piratebay. This way you can find whatever you need in whatever bitrate you want (as someone else has said, mp3 is fucking trash for classical music.. even death magnetic a heavy metal album sounded like dogshit in nasty compressed mp3) and not have to shell out 95% of the bill towards a greedy publisher.
Last two albums I wanted:
-realize an album is out
-check wikipedia to confirm album name/release date
-download torrent from piratebay
-double click an icon on my desktop
I now have it. Forever. No DRM. No greedy publisher getting their filthy hands on one mother fucking cent.
And though most people don't believe me until they see me doing this in person, I mail a check for the price of the album (the actual price as if I bought it in a store) to the artist/studio.
Of the 87 checks I've mailed, only 13 have been cashed. 48 have been returned. 26 lost and forgotten or whatever. To me that simply means 13 artists have accepted payment and 74 wanted me to have their work for free. That was nice of them and I appreciate it.
Now I want to see some fire.. some flames and rage from all the legal and ethical geniuses of /.
I'm tempted to make some lame joke about Sackbutts, but I suspect that I already did. How-evar... I'm a recent convert to the wonderful sound of Citterns... I don't suppose you know which shady alleys might serve my deviant tastes in music?
Here in Spain I use Diverdi, at www.diverdi.com. I only buy classical music in SACD, and they have a really huge catalog. SACD Hybrid discs have a CD layer, making it simple to move tracks to your computer or portable audio player. It's true that you have to buy additional equipment (I recommend Oppo's BDP-83!), but the difference in sound quality is staggering, and well worth the added cost.
IANAL but I don't think students have an exemption from obeying copyright laws - don't the RIAA go after college students quite often?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Are you the PrecambrianRabbit who's writing this thesis, per chance?
Don't be ignorant - ipods support Apple Lossless.
The best option is Classical Archives:
http://classicalarchives.com/
Great selection, great editing of the site by musicians who know what they are doing, unlimited streaming for $6/month or buy tracks as you like.
The parent is right. Listen to a harpischord recording at 128kbps. It's awful. Or a soprano. If you can't hear any effects of MP3 encoding, you're not trying hard enough. Perhaps 256 or 320 is fine, but Amazon doesn't sell them.
I think that you would be pleased with hdtracks.com's classical selection. They don't have anything composed by György Ligeti. But you could always visit thepiratebay.org since you don't seem to mind US copyright law. Also, Wikipedia seems to provide some useful links to György Ligeti recordings.
It is not just the Mozart and Bach type of classic that is missing. Things like Dixieland jazz and Rockabilly also are quite hard to come by. Our musical heritage is being lost. A lot of this loss is caused by the copyright nuts. If they would let outfits like Stream Tuner alone much music could be preserved. As it is many of the tunes could not be properly recorded when originally created as machines did not exist that could do the job. So what we are left with are people in the 1950 era playing the old tunes and re-issuing that music. That creates that copyright nightmare all over again.
http://www.qobuz.com/ also offers a pretty good (not only) clasical catalog in mp3, wma lossless and apple lossless.
Classics Online, owned by the decidedly non-RIAA Naxos label, is by far the best source I've ever found. Not only do they have *everything* from Anonymous Four onwards, but they're not Evil, don't have any DRM, give away a free track a week, and frequently have "samplers" of composers you'll never have heard of, where you get ~20 tracks for £2/$2. I'm not affiliated with them, but I am a rather satisfied customer.
My UID is prime. Is yours?
Also check out KDB Radio at kdb.com. Monthly advance listings are where to look. Pretty good signal for internet radio. Annoying plugin, but i beleive that's an acceptable trade, see this next bit:
Here you go: http://kdb.com/musicsched.htm
sure, it's "programmed music" i.e. to fit their day plan / style, but i've never heard an interruption to any piece.
This is
Trouble is the people who distribute classical music have got their head up their ass and cannot see the forest for the trees.
The stuff you are seeing on the iTunes weekly single is most likely "crossover" classical like The Three Tenors and so on. Real classical works tend not to be 5 minute singles. They tend to run from about an hour to 2.5 hours.
DG did an early digital (Philips) recording of Tchaikovsky's 4,5 and 6th as performed by the Berliner Philharmoniker and conducted (of course) by Von Karajan. This was, for me, "the" recording ever since I was a teen and first heard it. Anyway, you can buy even those recordings on their site. It's not as if they just have new stuff, or just have giant classics (although that recording was important in many ways) - they've been moving toward having EVERYTHING in their catalog online. And once you buy it, it's yours - I've had two oops events and all it took to regain them was to log back into the site and add them to my download queue. They also have been known to give out freebies on certain holidays.
Oh yeah - and there's usenet. You may find it hard to believe, but there's quite a lot being shared there.
(citation needed)
There are thousands of radio stations acessible via Streamtuner and these can of course be saved with Streamripper.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I have nothing really constructive to add but more of an off shoot that is semi-related. The Vitamin String Quartet can be rather amusing. Basically they are a revolving cover "band" that does string arrangements of some what popular artists work. They tend to do mostly punk/metal/rock type stuff. Mainly a novelty act from what I can gather but I would recommend the album they did of Bad Religion (mega fan of them). Its interesting to hear works that you know (especially in genres not known for their technical merits) become "classicalized". Do a Google or YouTube search and youll find a some of their stuff. If I remember properly you can get their stuff through iTunes. Good luck
http://magnatune.com/ has already been mentioned, they have some good Early Music recordings. Check out the folk stuff, too, there's some good crossover material.
But what's the use if their DSPs noticeably distrort sound when playing at 80% volume or more (which is how I sometimes listen to classical :)
Well, it sounds like the only option available in that circumstance is not to listen to it on an ipod.
I'm not enough of an audiophile to suggest spending a fortune on a stereo but regardless of the formats they support, MP3 players have a tendency to sacrifice audio quality in their quest for portability. Get a good stereo, get a good set of headphones and blow out your eardrums.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
If you happen to live near a public university with a good music school, you should be able to at least listen to the music at the library, even if you can't check anything out. You won't be able to rip it, though, since it's likely they'll put it in a player behind the desk and direct you to a listening station. /worked at the music library in college
iPods support CD quality Apple Lossless, but they do not support higher sample rates. So while you can create a 24/96 Apple lossless from a flac, you have to downconvert it to play it on an iPod. This would be less annoying if iTunes were better at managing multiple versions of a particular file. Quite possibly not exactly what the previous poster was complaining about though.
According to this educational purposes are covered under the fair use doctrine. As a music student I could legitimately claim that copying library CDs is a necessary part of my studies. However, I am not a lawyer either so I don't know how well that claim would hold up in court, especially with the RIAA salivating at the mouth just thinking of eliminating the fair use doctrine.
Likewise, I don't know if a non-music student could stand by that claim in court. Luckily, a lot of classical recordings, particularly the hard-to-find ones are produced by small, independent, and less litigious recording companies not part of the RIAA.
That depends on the library. I've been to libraries with dedicated listening sections and then there are libraries like mine that will let you take CDs home (LPs have to stay.) I don't know this for certain, but I suspect that the policy is based more on the fact that the library is concerned about resources going missing. In the case of the library where I attend, forcing people to listen to recordings in the building would be completely impractical. I estimate they circulate at least a hundred albums on a slow day and setting up listening stations to accommodate that many listeners would be as ridiculous as forcing them to keep all musical scores in the building as well.
Honestly, find a few labels that carry the stuff you know you like, and sign up for their newsletter or just check the release schedule on occasion. The other alternative, as someone mentioned, was to find a group of similar minded individuals and join their forum (Google can help you with that).
Aside from that, you can try the usual streaming suspects (last.fm and Pandora, etc..) but you might also try some off the wall streamers like Soma.fm, etc.
Is MySpace still an e-venue for bands trying to do promotion? Does Wikipedia have articles for bands you like?
Also, if you can describe what types/aspects of 'classic' you like, especially for the historical stuff, that will help you tons. For example I perfer Harpsichords over Pianos, and especially accompanied by strings... alittle hunting brings up a few hits that that gets you started.
Once you FIND what you're looking for, I'm sure you still have some sorta media store like a BestBuy that you can put in special orders from, or just buy their stuff on Amazon, etc
----- The internet has given everyone the ability to have their voice heard equally as loud.. even if they shouldn't be
Most of the popular music delivery services (you can parse this in two ways) consider music contents as constituted of one single sound file (or stream). Classical music works are usually much more than one single "track" and are structured - one level (movements) or more (e.g., for operas: acts, scenes; multiple works, etc.). Only few metadata systems take this into account and know how to present a work as a whole yet structured into its "parts", and without repeating the whole title on each of the parts. Additionally, in most of these systems, there is no real distinction between performer(s) and author(s) (composer of the music, author of the lyrics, etc.).
Deutsche Grammophon has a DRM-free web store (predictably at www.deutschegrammophon.com). Once you register with them, you can always go back to your account and re-download stuff you've bought, and the content is delivered as high-bitrate MP3s with no DRM, so you can move them between devices without difficulty.
I am not affiliated with these folks, I'm just a satisfied customer, and also slightly mystified that a DRM-free music store isn't more widely known.
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
It's really warhorse symphonies last that long. Many concerti last about 20-30 minutes. Typical orchestral programming (at least around here) has two pieces of that length played in the first half of the concert, and a 40-minute or hour-long piece in the second half after the intermission.
Sounds like a job for fluting point.
Makes sense... Exactly my point.
Ohhh... I thought your point was that you were expecting Formula 1 performance from a station wagon. In that case, just put Rockbox on it or get better headphones and an amp.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
A last resort would be the Naxos Music Library.
I've gotten a lot of mileage out of Naxos. Their quality isn't the absolute best, but its pretty good, and their prices are great.
A bigger issue for me is finding new music. If there's any still being written that I would find compelling, I'm not aware of it. The Sibelius violin concerto is the most modern piece that I really like. Mostly I listen to Bach, but even though I've got about 10 hours of his stuff, I've heard it so many times I've become bored with it. Same with Beethoven. Same scene with rock music also. Tool is the only contemporary band that does anything for me at all, and I'm thoroughly sick of the 'classics'. I guess I should have practiced more so that I could write my own.
Have you tried PBS.org? They seem to show all sorts of classical stuff - maybe through the site are others that target this genre.
I don't expect to find classical on the net any more than at most record stores. The demand's too small, and if they have any at all, it's usually by crappy little eastern Europe orchestras at bargain prices.
If you're anywhere near a big city, public libraries often have tastefully chosen recordings; often they show little wear. There are also quite a few classical stations listed in iTunes; many of them have PD's who know their music. MN Public Radio has long had an excellent station.
Once I hear something on there I know I'll be appreciating for a lifetime, I'll go buy it. Else the day will come when those recordings are only available used.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
Great post! I'm listening to Naxos right now, thanks to you!
http://www.discogs.com/
Granted, this is a local public radio station in upstate NY, but you can stream it anywhere. WXXI is one of the vanishing breed of predominantly Classical radio stations here in the US. They have some jazz programs, and a little bit of news (and you have to put up with the occasional Public Radio fundraisers), but it is probably 90% high quality classical music programming: http://streaming.wxxi.org/fm-hi
(The station has been around for something like 40 years, so it's the station I grew up on!)
Your Servant, B. Baggins
I'm not enough of an audiophile to suggest spending a fortune on a stereo...
I loathe that "audiophile" tag. I have a formally diagnosed "ski slope" hearing loss towards the upper frequencies, but I can still listen critically enough to hear obvious inadequacies in a recording or its reproduction, and I daresay most people can do likewise if they put their minds to it.
Because listening is as much an active experience as passive (especially with regard to classical music). That odious term "audiophile" is often applied to people with more money than sense, who are inclined to accept all sorts of voodoo without empirical evidence. The fortune I have spent on my stereo is just a small one (less than $AU10K), but it is also a carefully considered one. This is (I have to admit) partly because I am married, so there is the WAF to consider, but mostly a result of common sense in recognition of diminishing returns.
But away from home, a sensible level of compression on an mp3 player is just fine. I don't expect to hear the finest nuances of Bartok's sonata for unaccompanied violin over the noise from an 8-litre Cummins diesel.
Try Musistica.com
Title: Please Stand By
32 kbps 16 KHz
Automated message that keeps looping every 30 seconds:
While some ethnic or dream music is playing in the background, almost sounds like Enya.
I'm located in Tennessee, US.
This space is not for rent.
You probably haven't even tried to find a specific recording have you? Classical music as a few more variables in complexity than other music because (generally speaking) anyone can perform the work, and even the same ensemble with a change of conductors can produce a drastically different recording. The director, ensemble, & composer all add to the equation for what defines "a recording" and as mentioned above, even a soloist recording the same works after a time span can offer a different interpretation worth comparing.
If you like "new music" you should really check out Mode Records at:
www.moderecords.com
Lots of Xenakis, Feldman, Cage, etc., etc. I think they are physical media only, but I know that at least some of their albums (e.g. the JACK quartet's recording of Xenakis's string quartets) are available on iTunes and Amazon.
Have you tried http://eclassical.com/ ?
They offer only mp3's, but at least they're DRM free.
I'm not like other individualists.
I use:
http://www.classicsonline.com/
http://www.deutschegrammophon.com/
http://www.linnrecords.com/
http://store.harmoniamundi.com/ (no download)
iTunes
Spotify
When in danger, whewn in doubt! Run in circles, scream and shout!
Ubuntu is equipped. Not pre-equipped.
Pre- turns a noun into an adjective. "Civil War" is a noun. Pre-Civil War is an adjective that we can use to describe things from before the Civil War. Pre means "chronologically before" not "in advance". Heated is not an event, but if it were... then a pre-heated oven would be ROOM TEMPERATURE. Unless it was a gas oven and the pilot light gave it some additional warmth.
Descriptivist excuse making in 3... 2....
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
This collection contains some of the most miraculous recordings of the previous century.
Every Friday the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum hosts live chamber music; twice each month they post those concerts on their web site as mp3s that you can download for free (under the Creative Commons License): http://gardnermuseum.org/music/library.asp It's an eclectic mix of music performed by either local musicians or young talent... Not too many famous performers.
Again, please cite something that discusses the distortion, otherwise I'll assume it is because you are suffering from some kind of impedance mismatch
Have you tried The International Music Score Library project? http://imslp.org/ A friend of mine suggested it, it looks like you can search by instrument... -D