![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amethyst73I satisfied a minor itch Sunday night by purchasing the soundtrack to Coraline. I did the minimal homework and found that, yay, the full album was cheaper as a download on Amazon than it was on iTunes by a buck (and came with no DRM on Amazon; I couldn't tell just by looking whether it was DRM-free on iTunes as well). (Edit: as of actual posting time, the Amazon price had come down to $5.00!) Hey, a buck is a buck and might buy me a soda later this week. So I downloaded Amazon's digital download manager, paid for the album, and started downloading.
Review part 1: Amazon's digital download manager. It comes up as a nice little window when you order something like MP3 files (or, I'd bet, a movie rental) from Amazon's digital store. It... mostly works. In our hands it had a tendency to randomly disconnect from the network. This wouldn't show up as an error message; the download progress bar for whatever song it was in the middle of would simply stop progressing. If one hit the 'Pause Download' button, then the 'Resume Download' button, it was usually fairly happy to take up the download where it had left off. Occasionally it would need additional assurance that there was really a network there, e.g. by opening up a tab to a new site in the browser window. Conclusion: Usable but needs work.
Review part 2: Coraline soundtrack. This is a wonderfully moody creation, just about perfect for listening to at work when you have to pay some but not concentrated attention to the task at hand. It's interesting enough that one can pop in at just about any point and enjoy what's going on, but has a uniform enough feel overall that it's generally no biggie if you find your attention has strayed for a few minutes. The children's choir is put to excellent use, singing its nonsense syllables: when used en masse, as in the End Credits, Dreaming, or Mechanical Lullaby, they make one think of gnomes or elves peeking out mischievously from behind corners. When a soloist sings, as in Exploration or Alone, the listener can easily imagine that it's the voice of Coraline herself. I think of Exploration as Coraline's particular theme: it comes up when she's first exploring the house she and her parents have moved into, a couple of times here and there (her bedroom - I think - in the other mother's house), and more slowly once things have gotten bad, with violins adding what could be heard as sung tears, an attempt to comfort the weeper, or both. I've listened to it a few times now, and enjoy it. One thing I did find curious about it is that the tracks on the album have only a vague correlation to their order in the film - is that common with soundtracks these days?
Review part 1: Amazon's digital download manager. It comes up as a nice little window when you order something like MP3 files (or, I'd bet, a movie rental) from Amazon's digital store. It... mostly works. In our hands it had a tendency to randomly disconnect from the network. This wouldn't show up as an error message; the download progress bar for whatever song it was in the middle of would simply stop progressing. If one hit the 'Pause Download' button, then the 'Resume Download' button, it was usually fairly happy to take up the download where it had left off. Occasionally it would need additional assurance that there was really a network there, e.g. by opening up a tab to a new site in the browser window. Conclusion: Usable but needs work.
Review part 2: Coraline soundtrack. This is a wonderfully moody creation, just about perfect for listening to at work when you have to pay some but not concentrated attention to the task at hand. It's interesting enough that one can pop in at just about any point and enjoy what's going on, but has a uniform enough feel overall that it's generally no biggie if you find your attention has strayed for a few minutes. The children's choir is put to excellent use, singing its nonsense syllables: when used en masse, as in the End Credits, Dreaming, or Mechanical Lullaby, they make one think of gnomes or elves peeking out mischievously from behind corners. When a soloist sings, as in Exploration or Alone, the listener can easily imagine that it's the voice of Coraline herself. I think of Exploration as Coraline's particular theme: it comes up when she's first exploring the house she and her parents have moved into, a couple of times here and there (her bedroom - I think - in the other mother's house), and more slowly once things have gotten bad, with violins adding what could be heard as sung tears, an attempt to comfort the weeper, or both. I've listened to it a few times now, and enjoy it. One thing I did find curious about it is that the tracks on the album have only a vague correlation to their order in the film - is that common with soundtracks these days?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-03-06 12:13 am (UTC)