Classical.com free albums

Nereffid

This week's free albums on Classical.com are Bizet's Carmen and l'Arlesienne suites and Prokofiev's Ivan the Terrible, both originally on the Forlane label.
The Prokofiev is an oratorio arrangement (by Abram Stasevich) of his music for the Eisenstein film. The orchestra, by the way, is the Russian Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra - classical.com has translated badly from French, by the looks of it. It was recorded at the Sofia International Festival in 1984, according to this.

Edit: I'm getting an error message when I try to download the Prokofiev.

JFLL

I like "ALESSANDRO SCARLATTI - Ivan the Terrible, Op. 116a". Quite nostalgic really, a cock-up on an Emusic scale. You can also click on "Who was Sergey Prokofiev?" Possible answer: not Alessandro Scarlatti.

cafreema

I'm getting the same error on Prokofiev.

Craig

fduniho

Thanks for mentioning this. It's nice to get free classical music.

I downloaded the WMA files for Bizet's Carmen Suite and found they were lacking ID3 tags. I then downloaded the MP3 files for the same album and found they were also missing the ID3 tags. Do their free albums typically lack the ID3 tags, or is this a fluke?

Since I downloaded both WMA and MP3 files at the same bitrate, I also noticed that the MP3s were uniformly smaller than the WMA files. So I will stick with MP3s from them.

mommio

I have downloaded five albums, and none of them are tagged. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the few minutes to tag everything to my satisfaction is a small price to pay. I didn't download the Mozart opera last week because my dialup disconnects and reconnects every 12 hours. That humongous file would have taken longer than that to download, so I passed it by. I haven't looked at this week's albums yet - too busy.

cafreema

The Mozart opera did have tags.

Craig

Nereffid

This week there's some Tchaikovsky from Menuhin (conductor, not soloist), plus an Offenbach album that I've managed to track down as this one.

RonanM

You can grab the Janacek quartets there right now (http://www.classical.com/free-classical-music.php) and Schubert symphonies 1 and 3.

Nereffid

Actually it's the full set of Schubert symphonies, and the quartets are Janacek/Dvorak/Enescu. I wonder how long it will take for classical.com to give away the entire Forlane catalogue?

mommio

Maybe some of you have already discovered this -- I found that clicking on the album cover on the Free albums page takes you to the album page. I was delighted because the first two or three weeks I was doing lots of searching. Seems things are usually much simpler than we want to make them.

RonanM

Good grief - they really went and done it - all nine Schubert symphonies. I succumbed to curiosity and downloaded. Sounds good so far - certainly hard to beat at the price!

mommio

Unfortunately, the Schubert file is too big for my dialup connection, which disconnects after 12 hours.

RonanM

Forget the Schubert. I downloaded it and the tracks are full of errors, including skips and endless repeats. Rubbish. Alas - because some of the playable tracks suggest it was a good cycle.

mommio

Problem here. The received zip files are the same size as initial download size. Unzip. One or more tracks show up in the unzipped list, but won't play. This has happened in my last two or three downloads. Any suggestions as to how I can remedy this?

RonanM

I don't know - I tried using XLD to change the format, checked the metadata to see if they had wrong start or end times, nothing worked. Looks like hideously corrupt data to me. They won't play even in the Mac's native preview mode. Real nuisance if you have waited endlessly for a huge file to download.

mommio

So it isn't just me, huh? Sometimes it doesn't matter, but when the bad track is part of a longer work, it spoils it all. I guess one shouldn't complain about free, though.

RonanM

Someone should tell them - they are shooting themselves in the foot here! I would have qualms about downloading any of their stuff, given the very poor tagging and quality control shown in their freebies.