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After much hard work and back-of-an-envelope calculations, we went officially live online on 1st February 2005, with Internet advertising, press releases and a full catalogue of 12 recordings to choose from! Exactly one month and three days later we made our first sale, and a grand total of €5.23 rolled into our account. I was starting to have my doubts, cancelled the limo and Caribbean holiday and got back to work... By the time I started writing this page, in November 2005, things were rather more fluid. Our catalogue was much extended, and thanks to the work in particular of Peter Harrison at disk2disc its growth it seemed to accelerate every month. We'd joined forces with Chandos to offer our releases through their own well-stocked web site, and some of my remastered historic recording were also now available on CDs from Divine Art. We'd been well-reviewed in The Gramophone magazine, regularly featuring in their new downloads section, and in 2006 featured on BBC Radio Three's CD Review programme. We made new friends around the world - special mentions going to Bill Rosen fir his regular insightful and educative reviews from California, and from Don Petter in the UK for the use of his phenomenal LP collection for forgotten and rare gems (not to mention his huge library of record catalogues, magazines, books etc.). Historic restoration: As much as I enjoy working on early LPs, it's with 78s that I'm most at home. I developed a general software chain for restoring the recordings from these vintage discs through many months of research, and although this undergoes constant refinement, I find I have a toolkit flexible enough to get the best out of the wide variety of material I work from. I'm glad there is no simple "press-the-button" answer to this kind of work, despite what some software vendors may have us believe - it is with great satisfaction, and often great astonishment, that hours of painstaking restoration work can generate the results here. And if you've read this far down, I trust you're enjoying them too (unless you're only here for Pete's stuff!). The future: As we come towards the end of 2006 and look into what 2007 holds in store, it's clear that the whole business of downloading classical music has come a long way since our rather lonely beginnings! As a result we are now embarking on an ambitious plan of expansion -as Pristine Classical - beyond our historical recordings into newly recorded material, both exclusively through the Pristine Audio label and in conjunction with other record companies. If you are interested in selling your classical music downloads on our site, please don't hesitate to get in touch with me! Andrew
Rose
Pristine Classical - bringing you DRM-free historic classical FLAC and MP3 download music since 2005
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I
launched Pristine Audio Direct in February 2005 as a sideline to our audio
restoration business, Pristine Audio, and to see whether my theory that
there might be something in this music downloads idea had any groundings
in reality.
