A basic guide to downloading - Page 3

James Jolly on classical music downloads on the web

Music from the web

How?

Until recently there weren’t many options for the download enthusiast to organise and play his or her music. Apple’s Jukebox has the enormous advantage of being part of the iTunes eco-system where music can be seamlessly acquired, stored and syncronised to your iPod. There are versions for Mac and PC, so everyone is catered for. Once installed, the set-up process is very easy: you simply follow the instructions on the screen.

Sound quality is an important issue for many classical music enthusiasts so before you start you need to decide what bit-rate you are happiest with. iTunes now encodes all its music at 256kBps AAC (which compares well with the 320 kBps MP3 files offered by the likes of Passionato and Classicsonline. 

If you've plenty of hard-disk space you don't need to worry about ripping CDs in a compressed format. Rip the disc using the Apple Lossless encoder, and then when you want to transport your music around on an iPod, iPhone or iPad configure iTunes 9.1 to convert the files at whichever bit-rate you want (I would be hesitant to go below 192kbps AAC – piano music tends to fray a little at the edges – but depending on the listening conditions you might be happy with 128kBps). Just go to Summary > Options and select "Convert higher bit rate songs to 128 kbps AAC". 

Now you are set up to download but before you go mad and start downloading an entire new music collection it’s worth pausing to consider how you’ll find all the music you’ve bought.

You will be amazed at how quickly you can amass a substantial collection of music on your PC (usually through a combination of ripping CDs and downloading) so it’s a good idea to create a ‘house style’ for cataloguing the music. The information that accompanies a music file – whether acquired automatically on the web using a service like Gracenote (which is supplied largely by fellow enthusiasts in a kind of collective responsibility) or as supplied by the DSP – can arrive in a variety of styles. Decide early on how you are likely to sort though your music when you are looking for something to listen to. (One example of the inconsistency of web-based metadata services is the difference you will encounter between discs if you are ripping an opera: each CD can attract a completely different style of information that can waste an enormous amount of time if you then edit it manually. You can even get the information in different languages between discs – not exactly conducive to easy listening.)

If you listen to classical as well as other genres (pop, rock, jazz, world and so on), the chances are that you will sort your classical music initially by composer and your non-classical music by artist or album. For the eclectic music consumer a good idea is to remove composer details from all kinds of music other than classical: this makes searching far quicker; and besides, the chances are that you’ve never heard of half the people who compose pop tunes. Relying on the genre column is one option but who does this?

Simplicity is the key note: pare the details down to the minimum.

Ludwig van Beethoven

Symphony No 3 in C minor, Op 55, ‘Eroica’

Allegro con brio

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra / 

Herbert von Karajan

may satisfy the completist (or the librarian), but that’s an awful lot of information to contain in the small window of an iPod (which actually has a larger window than many MP3 players). Why not settle for:

Beethoven

Symphony No 3

I (or first movt)

BPO / Karajan

It says exactly what is playing and gets the message across with economy and clarity. The best advice is to experiment and decide how much information you need to find your music quickly and efficiently. (Do be careful that you don’t oversimplify your system – there is a risk that you could end up being offered all the first movements, followed by all the second movements and so on – and that risk is increased when you start adding multiple versions of a particular work to your collection. And if you’re especially completist you’ll almost certainly run into trouble when you add a different version of a particular work by a single performer – say, Brendel’s Hammerklavier Sonata, but that’s probably not going to happen too often!)

Another decision that needs to be taken is whether to keep your music in its original album form (do you want the Bruch Violin Concerto always to deliver the Mendelssohn as well?) or to store your music as individual pieces. 

There are strong arguments to be made for both approaches: on a purely practical level you’d be amazed how quickly you seem to be re-programming your iPod if you have broken up albums into individual pieces (though you can easily make a special playlist that includes all your favourite violin concertos, so you can have a feast of Maxim Vengerov in great concertos if you want).