|
|
How to Hear
Recorded Excerpts of
Almost All Gold Standard Songs
|
|
-
As you know, websites such as
iTunes.com and Puretracks.com have large, excellent databases of songs.
You can legally download a tune for a small fee.
-
Before deciding if you
want to buy a track, you can listen to a 30-second excerpt for free. Good
sound quality, too.
-
iTunes is probably the first website to try if you
want to listen to a free, legal sample of a Gold Standard song.
-
One website, however, has recorded excerpts of
practically every song on the Gold Standard Song List—songs you can't get
at iTunes. However, before you visit this site, read over the following
information. It will save you a lot of time and aggravation.
ALLMUSIC
REGISTRATION
-
The site
is www.Allmusic.com, online since the mid 1990s. It's a massive
free
database of recorded music and related information, dating from the early 20th Century to the
present.
-
Although
the site is free, you have to register to get full access to everything on
the site. You’ll need full access.
-
Fortunately, registering with Allmusic
is easy and safe—they won’t spam you if
you don’t want their email. During the registration process, just uncheck
the boxes requesting their permission to put you on their email lists.
-
If you do this, the only email they will
ever send you is the one with your user name and password, which you
will need to login at the Allmusic website for the first time only.
During login, if you check the appropriate
box, you will never have to login again, and will
still get full access to the site every time you visit.
-
Once you've registered at Allmusic, you
get access to millions of recorded song excerpts.
-
Near the top of the page
are two search boxes:
-
In one, you enter the title of
the song or album or artist's name you’re
looking for.
-
In the other, you choose a category of information from a
drop-down list—“Name” (i. e., performer, band, songwriter, etc.), “Album”,
or “Song.”
AN
EXAMPLE
TO TRY
-
Suppose you’ve never heard the song
“Wood River” by Connie Kaldor, and you want to hear what it sounds like.
-
First, you go to iTunes but discover it’s not available there.
-
So
you go to Allmusic.com and type “wood river” in the first search box (upper/lower case does
not matter), select “Song” from the second box, then click on “Go.”
-
Allmusic responds with a list of song
title matches, with “Wood River” at the top. When you click on the top
match, you get a list of recordings entitled “Wood River” by different
songwriters. (Connie Kaldor
is not the only songwriter who wrote a tune titled “Wood River.”)
-
You can sort the list of recordings by
performer, composer, album, date, or genre by clicking on the label at the
top of the column. This comes in handy when you’ve looked up a song with hundreds of listed recordings, such as a Gershwin standard.
-
The third column shows a speaker icon, which you click on to hear the
song. Several artists have recorded Kaldor’s “Wood River,” so you can
click on the speaker icon associated with the performer of your choice.
A FEW
ALLMUSIC
SONG-AUDITIONING
QUIRKS
1.
Sometimes you have to click on the speaker icon several times before the
media player on your computer opens and plays the 30-second excerpt of the
recording.
2. Sometimes the media player fails to connect because the
network is choked with traffic. Quite often, actually. Not surprising
for a free, huge, and busy website. If the song you've selected doesn’t start
playing within 5 to 10 seconds, it’s not going to connect. Don’t wait
for the media player to time out. Just close the media player and try again. You might have to
try several times before you get a connection and hear the song.
3. The sound quality of the Allmusic recording will usually
not be as good as the sound quality at a commercial download site such as
iTunes.
|
