. . . whereas this one:


is barren. When we "click" on "listen" all that happens is that a little box pops up, entirely blank but for the words "amazon.com." We have the distinct impression of a hustle of northern American all promise but no action "businessmen" terrified at the idea that they might be giving something away for no monetary reward and not quite knowing what to do next running around in tight circles like little dogs chasing their own tails.

Oh dear, SG, perhaps your pencil and paper have Javascript disabled?

No Andy, I think it far more likely that SCGrew has been trying to sharpen his quill without opening his pen knife.

The clips play well enough on this laptop. By the way, I was listening to WR's short Wind Quintet last night. Pleasant enough, but nothing to write home about. Fortunately the disc carrying it also had excellent works by Cowell, Harrison and Crawford. There is also Becker's "The Abongo", but I have not yet listened to that.

Baz, my suggestion was entirely serious - at least as far as Javascript is concerned

I use Firefox with NoScript which stops all Javascript by default. When I temporarily allowed it for amazon.com, the samples played OK.

PS I'd like to ban the use of IE on my machine too but unfortunately there are lots of badly designed sites around which just won't work with Firefox - while I'm not too bothered about most of them, I do sometimes have to start IE.

We use Opera and have a similar reluctance to touch IE, which we believe the above-mentioned northern American "business"-men enthusiastically embrace when they are not chasing their own or each other's tails. It is all they know or can permit themselves to conceive!

It is probably possible to get the link working by tinkering with "options." Just now we turned on "play sound in web pages" but it made no difference. We do have "javascript" enabled, and had no problem with Mr. Derks' link. Some time ago we had problems of a similar kind with Swedish Radio, but have not recently listened to it and have forgotten what we did. Perhaps an hour of leisure will enable us to solve their silly conundrum.

We eagerly await the day when every work of every known composer, even all those of rare men such as Rootham and Holbrooke, will be available on the Internet to every youth at the touch of a single button, without the necessity for commerce of any kind. It must surely come soon!

I think, Mr Grew, that is known by the general term "Eutopia".

Baz 

Indeed Mr. D. has a good point and we shall bear it in mind in future.

To hear as we are now at last able to do the Member's samples of Riegger's compositions we have had to do no fewer than five things of various kinds:

1) enable "sound in web-pages" (normally we have it off)
2) enable "plug-ins" (normally we have them off too of course)
3) un-hide "file types normally opened by Opera"
4) edit the handling of file type "mp3", and change "show download dialogue" (which is what we normally have, but do not get in this case) to "open with Opera"
5) edit the handling of file type "wma", and change "show download dialogue" (which is what we normally have, but do not get either in this case) to "use plug-in".

Those northern American "business"-men are such a nuisance are not they! Yet as we say with Mr. Derks' sample none of that was needed. To-day's samples are terribly short, but all pleasant to listen to.

I note that 'conductor' does not take a capital 'c' in Dr Scholes' book...