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?"

a heretical suggestion

[khallow]

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.

Re:Amazon?

[BrokenHalo]

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.

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 [heringman.com] who do offer their recordings as uncompressed .wav files that you can burn to CD or play directly.

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.

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Re:ArkivMusic or Naxos

[etnoy]

I find this whole audiophile thing pretty interesting, especially now something very similar starting to spill over into mainstream photography. JPEGS are out!, we need 16 bit RAW files for out holiday snaps! As a digital artist, I find it disturbing that people are going to let a JPEG artefact (real or imaginary) spoil their enjoyment of a picture: you're looking at it wrong!

I just couldn't let this pass by without comment. Yes, I am a flac kind of a person, and take pride in ripping music with the absolute highest quality. I am also a photographer, and yes, I shoot in raw format. Why? Because I do post-processing. On every photo I take. A good-quality jpeg is indistinguishable from raw until you start doing the least bit of editing. Then the differences will be clear as day and night. Ever tried rescuing an underexposed 8-bit JPEG and then try the same with a 12-bit raw? And don't get me started about color spaces...

JPEG is perfect for the holiday shooter, though, but personally I long for the 16-bit raw files (best available today on 35-mm SLR:s is 14-bit). That will take care of *some* of the imaging artifacts that come from the rounding errors between the sensor and the memory card.