Available for a bit less than twenty bucks at musiciansdice.com. (via Wired)

This means that you can instantly download and then burn an exact duplicate of what you would purchase in a store. You previous quality naysayers should now be satisfied.

Currently they have only launched in the UK, so you have to pay in pounds.  Also, they seem to be a tad more popular then anticipated: the site frequently is spitting out “too many users” type messages at the moment. This means you might have to wait until late-at-night GMT before being able to explore and download stuff properly.

Despite these initial hiccups, this is great news for the classical music world.

UPDATE: it looks likes you get a whole bunch of free music just for signing up, although most of these tracks are individual movements it includes a complete performance of Saint-Saens symphony No. 3.

A recent industrial research survey by the NPD group shows that only 10% of Amazon’s users are converts from iTunes, and iTunes also only holds 6% of the total market share of music sales in the US (compared to 19% for iTunes, 15% for Wal-Mart and 13% for Best Buy) which is actually a decrease in relative market share from 6.7% last spring.

Maria commented last time that she though the average iTunes user probably was just buying a couple of songs they heard on the radio, and likely doesn’t care about 128Kbps bitrates. I think that’s bang on. The thing about Apple is that everyone and their mom recognizes the brandname instantly. I would hazard a pretty whopping guess that the majority of people do not distinguish between “iPod” and “MP3 player” or “online MP3 retailer” and “iTunes”, let alone caring about the difference between 128Kbps and 256Kbps or AAC vs. MP3. They just want to get a copy of “Soulja Boy” they can play on their pink iPod Nano.

In fact, since most of the music purchasing audience probably doesn’t give a crap about technical specifications at all, it’s not terribly surprising that more companies haven’t pushed ridiculously-high-quality (specifically, lossless) digital recordings. The increase in users this would attract versus the expenditure is probably negligible for outlets which make most of their money from mass-market sales.

On the other hand, this is probably why DG is very smart to have 320Kbps audio available. Classical listeners are stereotypically extremely concerned with audio quality, and a classical store offering higher quality recordings will poach a significant fraction of classical downloaders from other sources. I would guess the same is true for jazz as well, another genre with more than it’s fair share of audiophiles, but since I can’t stand jazz I dunno if there are any specialty high-quality retailers out there.
In the end, there has to be a financial incentive for a company to offer high quality recordings, and currently there is no widespread public demand for this. Joe Consumer is far more concerned with having a pretty interface than downloading DRM free music. I suspect this will only change when either Amazon becomes a real threat to iTunes, or when seamless transferral of music to relatively high quality reproduction systems (see: not listening through crappy earbuds) is commonplace. Or perhaps music will get dragged along with the demand for HD video transmissions.

Here’s to the day when we can download lossless HD music in glorious 50.1 surround sound. Until then I am pretty content with 320Kbps.

Warning: he says fuck, so you might not want to watch at work.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Although music is less limited in this kind of circumstance (after all, if you’ve got earphones in you’re directly hooked up, but there isn’t an equivalent input for vision, we’re still waiting for retinal laser projection) it’s still a related problem, what with the low bitrates, over-compression, horrible earbuds, etc. Plus, David Lynch kicks arse.

What would be really interesting to see is a review encompassing the key $20-$50 range, which is more typical of people who want decent sound quality without paying extortionate and exorbitant amounts of money. I’ve been pretty happy with my $45 Sennheisers. They’re about 3967 times more comfortable than the ergonomic monstrosities which I got with my player, and sound a hell of a lot better.They also seem like a good balance between cost and quality, given that they tend to be used in a noisy environment.

• 320kbps MP3s with no DRM limitations -  this is easily the highest quality music you are going to get from any of the online music stores. If you can distinguish this from CD audio you have extraordinarily good ears and an extremely expensive stereo.
• Liner notes - You get a PDF download of the liner note booklet with each album you buy. Hooray!
• Out of print CDs – They have over 600 out of print CDs available for download.
• Web-based download system – No stupid front-end program is needed, so you can download stuff directly from the webpage, using any operating system you like.
• A-la-carte shopping – It’s not subscription based, individual tracks vary depending on length (but not using stupidly directly proportional pricing, there are a few tiers, just as I hoped) but pretty much everyone will probably download a whole CD for around $11.

It looks like the last few nails are getting hammered into my CD buying activities. This gives you almost identical sound to a CD, as well as the liner notes, but it’s near instant and already encoded as MP3. Thanks DG!

It started on the far side of the bridge, and so by the time I pranced up the road to my front door (well, prancing really isn’t so appropriate here, what’s a bit more apt… dragged, limped, something droopy and miserable) the music was almost peaking… and then I’m home. Bad timing. Closing the door should coincide with a natural stopping point in the music, not the middle of a crescendo. I don’t like keeping my headphones on indoors as I can’t hear any flatmates or assassins.

However, this time it wasn’t a problem. As I reached my room my mp3 player vibrated to let me know that it’s successfully made contact with the stereo over wifi, and now they both know which piece I am listening to and where in the piece I am currently at. I just have to press a button, and bam – the stereo starts playing at exactly the same point as the mp3 player is up to. It’s a seamless handover of music.

Well, actually of course that isn’t what happened at all, because neither of my music systems are that sophisticated. However, it would be pretty trivial to set up something like that with the newer stereos and mps. In a few years when you have your friends over, you’ll all be able to take turns ordering the stereo around with your iPods, picking and mixing across all the playlists floating in waves through the room.

However, I think the biggest advantage of recorded music is one of it’s most obvious and intrinsic characteristics: you can play it many, many times. This is massively important with classical, since it takes so long to get the hang of a piece. If I had had to understand Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 2 (for example) by relying purely on orchestral performances… well it’s never played so I wouldn’t have heard it… but if it were, I would have had to see it about fifty times before it made any kind of sense. That’s a lot of concert.

Generally it seems hugely preferable for me not to hear a real live piece until I’ve listened to it a bunch of times in the comfort of my apartment. I want to understand the piece first, instead of trying to piece together the themes in the concert hall. I want to be able to twine along the melodies while the orchestra is playing, to make newer and deeper bridges and uncoverings and connections. Things spring out and bite you when the music is on the stage, instead of stuck in the stereo – but it’s so much more potent when the latter has already built a bed from which the former can ascend.

My MP3 player is a perfect foundation builder. It knows it isn’t the real thing, that it’s an imitation – but it’s an imitation which lets me isolate myself from the outside and dive and delve into a greater and greater understanding of whatever it’s currently holding onto. It’s portability is perfect for letting one slip off into a bit of a listening session whenever someones opus number something starts slithering around your head.

The more I listen to a piece and understand the ins and outs and backs and twists and fronts, the more I want to hear a real, true, orchestra playing it. No matter how much I’ll fall in love with a particular recording, the ultimate goal is always to hear a great, real-life performance.

But without that build-up, without all of those not-quite-real versions of a piece, for me the reality isn’t nearly as rewarding.

The way I initially read it (and I read it about five times – it wasn’t nearly as much of a knee-jerk reaction as the one he is suspicious of, honest!) was: since iPods are basically pretty crappy at reproducing music, people shouldn’t post iPod playlists, as this might encourage people to use them to listen to classical music. I then defended this by arguing it was not necessarily such an awful experience as he thought it was. Besides, anything which encourages people to listen to classical is (almost certainly probably) a good thing.

I still don’t think that putting up a specifically iPod playlist is really a big deal; but maybe that’s because my eyes kind of blank out the iPod in the sentence. I spend so much time listening to music in-ear that it seems completely natural to bias a weekly selection of pieces toward that particular listening method, instead of just calling it a neutral “playlist.”  If I didn’t spend so much time with my earbuds plugged in I guess all the ipodification could well get irritating. I suspect that most iPod playlist-putter-uppers who specify the “iPod” bit are thinking in a similar way – they aren’t putting that particular noun in there deliberately, it just comes out like that.

Maybe the most important thing is simply for people to be aware of the limitations of the method which they are using to listen to their music. As JonJ pointed out in a comment, basically what it comes down to is that one needs to be satisfied with the quality of the stuff you’re pumping into your ears, but it’s also important to be aware of that quality. I suspect quite a few (for example, someone who gets almost everything off of iTunes instead of ripping from CDs) people haven’t had the benefit of experiencing just how bad a piece sounds on a low quality system when compared to a high quality one, and how poor both are when compared to the real thing.

While over-compressed music sounds pretty horrid – especially classical with all it’s acoustic variations and nuances – my MP3s at 192Kbps sound rather good on my non-iPod, iPod (if you see what I mean). When there’s a crazily big tutti going on it can occasionally get a bit hairy, but in general I can actually hear way more subtleties compared to listening to the original CD on the stereo. Of course, this is using a replacement to the piece-of-crap earphones included with the player.

And if you really can’t stand MP3s, you can always encode in FLAC, which is lossless.

What I genuinely do not understand the animosity toward bloggers who put up their current playlists. I seriously don’t think it’s being done in a effort to look cool, but actually because they like to share their listening preferences. If I didn’t have my portable audio capabilities (what a very futuristic robot I am) I’d be listening to two or three hours less classical music a day, and that would make me sad.