Mahound’s Weblog

… no, I’m not going crazy… and it was not through iTunes. I was looking for interpretations of the opus “El Maestro”, from the renaissance spanish vihuelist Luis de Milan, which contains some beautiful vihuela + voice portuguese, spanish and italian songs. I hapened to find it at magnatune.com, performed by Jacob Heringman and Catherine King. I listened to the album once, using the mp3 streaming option available from magnatune, and got convinced. Magnatune allows a “make your price” scheme, being that the minimum for an album is 5 USD. I ended up paying 8 USD, which is the default price, since it’s roughly the same as 5 EUR, a round price, something that I would pay for a promo CD in a regular store. Then, I downloaded it in FLAC (magnatune offers WAV, FLAC, AAC, MP3 and OGG). I got the artwork, in PDF, as well.
The license allows me to share 3 copies of the work with my friends - that’s great, since it promotes sharing (I like to share my tastes with my friends, and I end up listening to some of their suggestions). And there’s no DRM, so… no big brother or bad policeman around, fighting to restrict your rights.
It’s obvious you won’t find mainstream audio at magnatune. However, the available genres span from medieval music performers to electronic composers, jazz, metal and even some pop. And I got very surprised with the quality of some of them. Well, you can listen to them for free… just give them a try.

Tags: renaissance, luis de milan, magnatune, drm, music, freedom, creative commons, el maestro, vihuela

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 10th, 2007 at 12:44 pm and is filed under Art, Music, News, Society, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.