You are currently browsing the monthly archive for September, 2008.
Tim Rutherford-Johnson is spot on talking about Passionato here. I still can’t believe the media happily swallowed the hype it generated before launch. Okay I take it back, I can. What we need is a classical equivalent of the brilliant Warp label and site.
Meanwhile on a genuinely worthwhile ‘classical’ site, NMC are continuing their indispensable reissue of Birtwistle recordings with Secret Theatre.
I have very much enjoyed watching the videos on the Medici site (once I learned to cope with the endearing Flash interface). You can currently watch a number of concerts from the Verbier festival for free there until the end of the month. I don’t really understand how there can be a compelling business model as the site it currently set up though, so perhaps enjoy it while you can.
Finally, Alex Ross was on Private Passions this week (available until next Sunday).
Been like this all day, but at least you can read about it on numerous tech blogs and even the BBC News site. So you can imagine what it might have been like.
I’ve held off writing about the changes to how BBC Radio is streamed which were introduced earlier in the summer. I mainly listen to Radio 3 and I’ve not widely tested other networks, but I have tested the iPlayer on a number of different computers and with different ISPs and I still find it an incredibly frustrating experience.
It should all be good news: streaming iPlayer music programmes at 192k is a huge step forward in terms of quality and I was so pleased at the prospect I was prepared to forgive the pretty appalling lapses in the first few weeks of the iPlayer when many Radio 3 programmes were posted wrongly (mainly old editions were being consistently posted but advertised as the most recent programme). But the implementation…
Presumably so as to make it as difficult as possible for people to download the streams all the Radio Programmes MP3s are now ‘wrapped’ in a Flash Player. The problem is that for longer programmes (really anything over an hour) in particular I have found the streams consistently fail at some stage. It’s so very frustrating.
Examples from abroad are instructive. NPR have gone the same route but provided more segments for their classical programmes which work better. Bayern 4 (which amongst other things provides live broadcasts from Bayreuth) offers a simple unwrapped MP3 stream.
So I am really puzzled why the BBC have gone this way (and done so in a fairly self congratulatory way). Do any of the people behind the technology actually listen to Radio 3 consistently?
In the meantime I have gone back to the 64k Real Player streams.
I admire the Sony Reader as piece of kit. I’ve been reasonably keen though to see what might actually be available for it before even thinking of any investment. The Waterstones eBook site launched today, which as far as I can see is the only site in the UK at least from which you can buy eBooks for the Sony.
Speaking as a fairly tolerant veteran of many cutting edge launches, I think we can safely award Waterstones current first place in the 2008 Shooting Yourself in the Foot eAwards.
The main problem appears to be that there is no reliable way of searching for eBooks. You can see for example that there are 3463 works of fiction. But you can’t search reliably within that category. Advanced Search offers the option of filtering by eBook but that is both a chore and it would appear not all eBooks are tagged as such. Or has the Reader really been launched with no titles from that minor author Dostoevsky available for example? In which case who on earth has been responsible for assembling the 3463 titles?
So – very very difficult to use the site, very hard to work out what’s there, but a cracking piece of technology. Can’t imagine Sony are too pleased.
Maybe one can download eBooks from sites in the States?
