Philharmonia Baroque's release of Atalanta gets press coverage

The Wall Street Journal wrote a nice piece in this saturday's issue about Philharmonia Baroque releasing the Handel Opera Atalanta exclusively on Magnatune.

I'm pleased that the article also mentions the licensing option, though it's funny that to many people, "music licensing" means "music you hear in an elevator" rather than films, television, and advertising.

We've been working really closely with Rob Birman, the executive director of PBO, as PBO is really keen to establish a worldwide reputation for themselves. A big part of that strategy is through unusual repertoire released on the Internet exclusively through Magnatune.

They've also done a gorgeous job with artwork, with a very striking design, and given us native PDFs so that print quality looks great for purchasers. They're not just slopping together stuff for the Internet, but taking it as their primary platform for establishing themselves.

Recording engineer David Bowles, who we've worked with a great deal on several projects (with the David Bowles Signature Series), has been mastering digital recordings the orchestra has done (they make two recordings of each programme, over two nights, in the same hall), removing any coughs and accidental street noises, so that the releases are perfect quality.

Comments

[Kirk McElhearn]

So I followed the link above to Atalanta, and was surprised that it was so short. Then I went to the artist's page and found that the link went to just the 1st CD. Yes, it does say CD1 Atalanta, but perhaps it would be better to have a link at that point, just below the title, to CD2. Or to have both CDs on the same page...

[Kirk McElhearn]

Another thought... I tend to rip operas with tracks joined by act or by CD - this way I don't have to worry about the dreaded gaps during iPod playback. (This is the same with almost any MP3 player.) Why not offer, for these works, single tracks pre-joined by act or by CD, explaining why. It would allow the purchaser to burn to CD if they want, though they wouldn't have track breaks. Or, you could offer both (if it's not too expensive for bandwidth): a burnable version, and a continuous version (though having a simple tutorial about joining tracks my be more cost-efficient).

[Ryan Sawhill]

Playback gaps on portable players like the ipod suck bigtime. I agree.
However, I do not believe the solution is for content providers to provide a broken work-around. If people really want to play that game, they should join the tracks themselves (there's software freely available that will help you do that). I think instead what we need to be doing is actually telling DAP manufacturers (especially Apple) that this is something we know is trivial to implement, and that we want it.

In the meantime, there's always Rockbox for the iPod. For those that haven't heard of it: it's an opensource project to design firmware for ipods that is better than Apple's. My two favorite points being ogg vorbis support and gapless playback.

[Kirk McElhearn]

While I agree in principle, I don't think that joining tracks per act or CD, at least for classical works, is necessarily broken. In many cases it is the best solution - you can then ues smart playlists to seelct entire works, instead of just movements.

Yes, Apple needs to use the Grouping tag, as they do in the Music Store, so classical works can stay togather. That would provide the ideal solution. But for now it doesn't exist (and I think it's even worse with other music player software.)

As for Rockbox, isn't that the same thing - a broken work-around? :-)

[Ryan Sawhill]

I don't know anything about this grouping tag--I have an ipod, but I don't use itunes at all. So in case I wasn't clear: I'm simply saying that the manufacturers should provide hardware functionality in their daps that we (some of us, anyway) became used to having on our computers more than five years ago. Seems that not that many people actually care though, so it might very well not happen anytime soon. Hence, Rockbox. It fixes something that I consider "broken" about my ipod. Now, I can listen to the same tracks I listen to on my computer, in the same way, without having to take some extra funky step to ipod-ize them.

It's totally up to John of course, but personally, I don't feel like it's Magnatune's job to deal with problem.

[Kirk McElhearn]

For now, I see nothing on the Rockbox site about gapless playback... (Unless their search function doesn't work.)

My question re gapless is this: why hasn't _anyone_ (except for the Rio Karma?) done gapless? If it were simple, they'd do it.

[Ryan Sawhill]

heh.. it's kinda funny that we're the only ones talking here.. =D

anyway, regarding gapless in rockbox, I assure you it works.

as for your open question, sheesh. I wonder the same thing. the only answer I can come up with is that it's the same reason it took so long for computer music software to do gapless playback: it IS an extra step, and the people designing it didn't care enough to worry about it... until people made enough noise. (my memory's a little hazy, but I'm thinking way back to the early days of the Winamp forums.. haha I used to LIVE there.)

at the moment, possibly a combination of the average person not caring and the unaverage ones falling into the common attitude that all we can do as consumers is.. consume.

[Steve W.]

I agree it is not up to Magnatune to solve the playback gap problem. It is the responsibility of the playback manufacturers like Apple, who seems more interested in adding features and complexity than fixing problems.

If an end-user is clever enough to find a fix then that's great. But it appears that John works his ass off hard enough and IMO the constant "do this/do that" babble constantly directed at him is really tiresome. Constructive suggestions are one thing but a lot of the comments around here are just some guy's tiresome know-it-all mentality and they need to back off.

[Kirk McElhearn]

Hey, Steve, you're mighty hostile... Don't you think that John appreciates comments and suggestions? Have you noticed that he often solicits them, such as when he changed his layout? I don't think he's bothered by reading a few comments. Why don't you back down and be a bit more polite.