Since my two earlier posts I've been in contact with Evan Schumacher, one of the founders of Fortuna Classical Music, who has responded in depth to many of the concerns and questions I expressed. With his permission I here reproduce his emails. The first:
I’d like to respond to a couple of the comments on your blog and try to give you some more information about us. It seems that we have at least struck a chord with you with our interface. We like to say that it “speaks” classical. I know of no other media player that inherently knows the difference between a track and a work. As you accurately pointed out, the thing that is most important with a digital classical music collection is tagging the music correctly. Unfortunately, the tags in audio files were designed for pop music and it is impossible to tag classical music with them, that is why we us our own database structure. This allows our users to quickly and smartly search their music collections, even with thousands of CDs. However, we do tag the audio files with as much as information as we can, so that if you listen to your music in iTunes or some other player, you aren’t totally lost. Of course, why do that when you’ve got Maestro.
One thing that is very important to us is audiophile quality. It was a requirement when designing the system. Maestro offers WMA Lossless files. The files are compressed using a lossless algorithm, meaning that no information is lost. Therefore when you play them you are getting exactly the bits that are on the CD. [...] We also use the highest quality hardware to ensure an audiophile experience. Our founder is a huge audiophile, and we had to please him before we could take a product to market.
I appreciate your comments on our subscription service. We always want to listen to our customers and are open to have other plans that would allow customers to add more than 5 CDs per month if it’s something they want.
One other point that I’d like to make is that users have full access to their music. Our software platform is Windows XP and users can easily browse to their music, share it over their LAN and copy it to external drives. Also, we don’t have DRM in our music, even the Cornerstone Collection is DRM free.
My reply:
We certainly are in agreement that a new interface for digital music is desperately needed that can support the particular requirements of classical music (I think much the same can also be said for jazz, and I know one or two bloggers who have expressed concerns about iTunes' deficiency here in the past). I suppose my overriding concern is why the decision to wed that innovative interface to a custom designed hi-fi component? Are there plans to market the interface independently of the Maestro unit? (I would be interested in a Mac version of this!) The need for a new interface is felt, almost entirely, I'm sure, by those of us who have large collections of digital music on our computers. The matter doesn't really arise for physical CD collections, which can be organised, searched and cross-referenced far more fluidly and personally than any computer interface – just by the fact that they are the physical property of a single owner who'll mostly know his way around his collection better than a computer.
Regarding WMA Lossless – my (minor) point about this was that even if it is genuinely lossless (and despite the name there remains controversy about this, I believe), the files still can't actually improve upon the CD that they were ripped from, so although there may not be a loss in quality, there isn't any gain either from switching from physical CDs to WMA. Incidentally, what bit-rate do you use for the WMA files (obviously this is the key issue here)? I had look on your site but couldn't find a mention.
And it's very good to hear that Maestro will be DRM free. Like a lot of music lovers I'm increasingly frustrated at the imposition of DRM on so much of the music that we legitimately purchase, and I warmly welcome your decision here.
His response:
There are several reasons we chose to wed the interface to the hardware. The customer we have targeted with our first product doesn't want to fiddle with computers and hard drives and sound cards. We want to provide them an all in one solution that could plug into a home theatre and provide audiophile quality sound and easy access to their entire music collection. Other companies have created products like this, but ignore the needs of a classical music collection. To be perfectly honest, if you have a classical collection any other "audio server" is worthless. You need the data and interface of Maestro to "speak" classical.
Providing the quality data the drives Maestro and its interface is a hard problem, and I believe we are the first ones to provide a solution for customers. To do this, our classical music experts have to go through every CD. Over time as we build up our database the likely hood of us offering a software product will increase, which would appeal to customers like you who already use your computers to listen to digital classical music.
I have to disagree with your comment that physical CD collections are more easily search and cross referenced than any computer interface. Our founder and many of our customers have over a thousand CDs. With such a large collection you often don't even know what you have. Maestro puts it all right at your fingertips. Also, what if you want to compare all your versions of a particular aria or movement of a work? With a physical CD collection this means finding the CDs you want and one by one putting them into a CD player. With Maestro you can easily find all versions in a couple of clicks and then instantly compare. When our founder got his first demo version of Maestro he quickly searched for all his recordings of the Beethoven Tempest Sonata (over 15 versions) and then listened to the first 20 seconds of each one over and over, analyzing their subtle differences. Only with Maestro is this so easy.
You are exactly right that WMA Lossless doesn't improve upon the CD version. However, we believe that audiophiles don't want us to change the music for them. Rather, using Lossless files, top of the line ripping software, and our high end sound card we provide an exactly replica of their CDs so that their high end Digital to Analog converters can do their job. As for the bit-rate on WMA Lossless, it's variable. The codec only compresses the file as much as it can without losing the ability to decode it to its uncompressed bits. This depends on the amount of repetition in the bits of the files. Usually the files are about half the size of an uncompressed file, or about 600 kbps.
So there you go. I'm still not sure how large a demand there might be for Maestro, but I don't have the benefit of market researchers here. It represents a serious investment for the high end of the classical music market (something to which I don't belong), and it is doubtless a fine solution to a number of problems with organising and accessing very large collections of classical music. What it doesn't yet represent, however, is a solution for those of us who use our computers as our music players much of the time; but it doesn't try to. This remains a problem, and now that Maestro has taken a lead in designing interfaces for digital classical music collections, can we hope that iTunes and all the rest – as well as metadata services such as CDDB – follow their lead and start to serve us better?
