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November 26, 2004
Podcast Review: In The Hands
This entry posted in:
4 stars
, I subscribe
, Podcast Review
Format: standalone music tracks
Content: classical piano
Rating: 
What I'm going to do: subscribe
Typical Length: 1 - 10 minutes
In a similar vein to Prent Rodgers' Microtonal Podcasts, Paul Cantrell podcasts some classical pianio pieces at his musical blog In the Hands.
These are very brief pieces, none (so far) longer than 7 minutes, and to my mostly-untrained ears, Paul plays very well. The pieces are a mixture of ones Paul composed with other composer's pieces (Chopin, Brahms, others). Each podcast is limited to an recording of the piano music itself and nothing else.
The recording quality is good - Paul says he records at a variable bit-rate, but all of the recodings that I saw were recorded at 158kbps or above. Since these are short pieces that's probably OK; it equates to just over 1MB/minute, much higher than some other music podcasts out there. Since there are no vocals, production values such as cleanliness of fades or other audio balance concerns are absent. In addition, since there's nothing but the music, track lengths are unimportant. Paul's meta-data could be a little better though; the current posts are both named and titled (in the track data) with simply the name of the piece excerpted, with no reference to the podcast title. That additional info would be helpful (rant). Paul seems to be aiming at pulishing every Tuesday and Saturday.
While these podcasts are clean and simple, I would love to hear a little more about the pieces being performed - a little of something human to the podcast. That said, I think it's going to be a great accompaniment to Prent's pieces in breaking up the music styles in my day-to-day soundtrack.
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Tagged: podcast podcasting review
Posted by cori at November 26, 2004 07:33 AM