Classicsonline - a Review

After the comment left on my little review of Passionato, I thought it might be a good idea to do a similar review of ClassicsOnline. It's the online download store for Naxos records. This means that as well as Naxos' huge catalogue of music, it stocks labels which Naxos distributes - a significant proportion of independent classical labels.

So there's plenty to choose from. Let's get down to the basics of how the site works - and how well it works. In summary, it's a good service that in my opinion could do with a few tweaks here and there. I'll get all the more negative comments out of the way first - keep reading for the good bits - and the nitty gritty on pricing!

The sign-up process was straightforward, although the warning that downloads were available only for 30 days after purchase made me think twice. Making somebody pay again after their computer went belly up seems harsh to say the least. Comparing it to a competitor EClassical (a site I like a lot, although the selection is much more limited) who keep a record of your purchases for re-downloading, it's a bit disappointing.

As was the offer of '3 free tracks' for download if you sign up before the end of the year. I found out that these tracks had been chosen by Classicsonline rather than being a free choice. As I already had one of them, it turned out to be just 2 free tracks for me! It might be nice to offer a choice from a longer list, at least.

But it was straightforward to download them - not terribly quick, but not too bad.

Here we come to my main beef with the website - it is, in fact, why I've not used them up to now and why they slipped my mind during that Passionato review. It's the navigation and search facilities. With such a vast catalogue available they are essential - I wonder if the size of this catalogue (coming from diverse lables) is what makes it pretty clunky. However, I think it should be able to work better than it does at present.

I thought I'd have a browse through the pages of products from the BIS label, mostly because I wanted to have a wee look at their Bach recordings and that's always quite near the beginning! I got to page 8, going page-by-page before my browser (Firefox) decided to freeze. Being curious as to how they'd price the Masaaki Suzuki St Matthew Passion (given that it's due a re-release as part of a breathtakingly bargaintastic 10 CD set), I tried to open that page, but again it wouldn't load up. My connection's pretty fast and seemed to be working well - so I tried Internet Explorer, where I got the same problem, freezing up as I got to page 8.

Bach to Firefox I tried a different tack, opening up the Atma Classique label page. It worked for a bit before getting stuck. So I waited. Eventually it did start working and, while I couldn't find what I was looking for Volume 4 of Montreal Baroque's cantata series, they had Volume 2 at a pretty reasonable £7.99.

Meanwhile the BIS page had loaded up! The Matthew Passion was £16 which is excellent value compared to the £30-ish of the standard triple CD, but sadly it just doesn't stack up against the new boxset (Matthew Passion, John Passion, Christmas Oratorio, B Minor Mass, Easter Oratorio & Ascension Oratorio) which MDT are currently offering for £29.25.

So I think prices are generally a plus point and seem fair, given the proviso that I think classical downloads (and downloads in general really) are pitched a touch too high when compared to CDs, especially boxsets.

Navigation again proved difficult when I used the search facility. The keyword search is pretty good but can be really slow. I remember on my earlier visit to Classicsonline earlier this year being really frustrated at having to resend searches and then being unable to follow links to results.

The advanced search seemed a little difficult too. I tried this first:

Composer: Bach
Artist: Masaaki Suzuki
Label: BIS

and got no results. When I changed it to:

Composer: Bach
Artist: Suzuki
Label: BIS

it turned up 61 results! Little things like this can really put people off, especially when it takes a long time to browse through multiple pages. Trying to narrow down one CD is also a bit inflexible. A search on:

Disc Title: cantatas 12

turned up nothing. Whereas a general keyword search on 'cantatas 12' did bring up Suzuki's 12th volume of cantatas as the 6th result. I think given the title of the CD is 'BACH, JS: Cantatas, Vol. 12 (BWV 147, 21)', 'cantatas 12' ought to find it via the title search.

The other most important thing, after finding what you want, is how easy it is to buy it and download it. Here, Classicsonline did a really good job, I thought, that pretty much made up for the frustrations of navigating the site.

The disc I mentioned in the previous post (Volume 3 of the Purcell Quartets 'early cantatas' series) is a very reasonable £7.99. It compares very favourably with Chandos MP3s which are £16.80, and the double CD, which you can get for around £10-12. I hope there's not been a mistake pricing it! I paid via Paypal (despite the recent scaremongering of Which magazine), which was nice and efficient and then it downloaded pretty quickly, in about half an hour. Given the file size (it's 320 kbps) I thought this was pretty good. Along with the tracks there's a pdf of the CD inlay and a (quite small!) jpeg of the front cover.

This is turning into a long, long post now. So I'll do another post on some more price comparisons! All in all I was pretty satisfied with Classicsonline. It was very frustrating at times trying to find things there (as I'm editing this to put in links, it's taking me ages to open product pages again), the free gifts were annoyingly limited, but the prices are fair and good value given the kind of market average and the downloading worked much better than I was expecting. So, more on pricing to follow...