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Got February's Naxos newsletter in my email inbox today. Yes, I know that it's not February yet, but they've sent it anyway as though it were the first of January.
The highlight of each newsletter to me, and I'm sure just about everyone else, is announcement of a new free album. The free album this time is Beethoven: Piano Sonatas Nos. 8, 14 and 23. And, of course, Naxos is the publisher.
Here's what to do to get it. If you are a subscriber, you also should have gotten a newsletter from Naxos today. Open it. Close to the bottom of the screen (the newsletter is so short that it takes up just one screen on my computer), you should see an orange button that says "Free Album--Download Here." Click on it. The webpage that appears will have a bright blue button (too obvious to miss) on it that says "Download." If you do, indeed, want to download the album, click on that button.
The resulting download is a zip file. Once you open it, you will be presented with a list of files for the 9 pieces making up the album. To listen to one, simply click on the file, and your default music player should open up and began playing the song. Note that there is also a booklet shown as a 1.4 MB PDF file. This booklet contains a tremendous amount of information about Beethoven, the album, individual pieces on the album, and a whole lot of other things. In lieu of giving you my typical abbreviated amount of that kind of information, myself, I will direct your attention to that PDF. Give me feedback, please, as to whether or not you prefer the brief tidbits of information that I usually give, or much more, as I will do this time.
The album is about 54 minutes in length. It is formatted in flac.
It looks like I'm going to finish this post in less than 54 minutes, so I will not have listened to all of the album by the time that I finish. The pieces that I've listened to thus far have been lively (typical Beethoven, I think) and, to my surprise, I actually have heard several of them, before, several times.
I got very disillusioned with Naxos this month (January), but to their credit all of the giveaways from them, that I know of, are formatted in the excellent flac format; "everyone" else offers only MP3's. Moreover, Naxos gives us the entire album in a giveaway, not just a piece or two. Furthermore, we can get up to two albums per month--in a couple of weeks or so, they will give the general public (not just subscribers to their newsletter) an option of one free album from three choices. That's being pretty generous!
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