BeigeJournal

This is a combined review of Magnatune and two albums they offer, John Fleagle’s Worlds Bliss and American Baroque’s recording of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.

Magnatune’s slogan is “we are not evil.” I suppose in the music business this is a bold new way to operate. Their contract terms with musicians are quite friendly and they are certainly customer-friendly as well. While I’m pointing to two recordings here that I, at least, like, you can stream 128kbps MP3s of the entirety of them for free and decide for yourself before spending any money. They don’t charge a fixed price but provide a pull-down menu with options from $5 to $18 which you select depending on how generous you feel. They suggest $8. One half of what you pay goes to the artist. Besides a warm, fuzzy feeling, you also get access to download high-bit-rate lossily compressed files in MP3, OGG Vorbis, and AAC format and losslessly compressed (FLAC) or uncompressed (WAV) files. They plan to offer burn-on-demand CD-Rs in generic packaging at cost, $5 extra, for those people who don’t want to download several hundred megabytes of FLAC files, but if you have the bandwidth the download is the way to go.

FLAC is an open format with open source implementations available for all the usual modern operating systems. Most Linux distributions include FLAC utilities. K3b, my current favorite DVD/CD tool, will burn an audio CD from FLAC files with no extra steps. The WAV files are roughly twice as big but will certainly present no compatibility problems. Folks like me will just get the FLAC files and transcode as needed ourselves but customers are welcome to download the MP3, AAC, or Vorbis files as well.

Magnatune is DRM-free, uses standard file formats, and is simply trouble-free. They appear to regard us as customers, not enemies.

I am very much enjoying John Fleagle’s Worlds Bliss—Medieval Songs of Love and Death. John had a great voice and Shira Kammen—another Magnatune artist—adds wonderful violin. Twa Corbies, familiar to me from Heather Alexander’s rendition, is very nicely done. I’m also especially fond of Da Day dawn.

I have also purchased American Baroque’s rendition of Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. I’ve been occasionally playing bits of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s arrangement of “Spring” for solo flute (something that’s going to need a lot of practice), and it occurred to me that although I have an old tape of the Seasons somewhere, I didn’t have a more convenient, that is, digital, recording. As they promise, it is a bit different from the generic rendition, but not radically so. I rather like it.