The appreciation of "on music appreciation"
1/20/2008
This is good stuff. It puts the details of knowing music "on the bottom shelf".
Good course, poor implementation
5/19/2008This software is used by my college for the online version of its music appreciation course. Overall, there is a lot of very good material with many listening examples. The course focuses heavily on the fundamentals of music, then on music history. There are, however, some sections dealing with 20th century music. I really enjoyed this course, but had problems keeping up with the course due to the layout of the program.
Your "textbook" is a combination of a website and the 2 cds sold in this package. The material presented online is just as much, if not more than you would find in a typical college text. There is no nice way of viewing the material offline and the music tracks on the CD's have fun names like HEO6HS.mp3. To access the music, you are supposed to click on the links in the lesson on the website, which is a weblink that opens a realplayer stream of the correct mp3 or portion of an mp3. You cannot use this feature while offline and you must have realplayer installed. I found this setup highly inconvenient as I was not expecting to have to spend so many hours glued to a computer screen and tied to the internet.
I understand it is an "online" course, but that typically entails a syllabus online, doing the bulk of your learning/studying from a book that can go anywhere and needs no screen or internet connection, going online for a little bit to interact with online activities or the professor and going on to the next lesson.
Other than the inconvenient setup I feel that the course was excellent, earning it 4 stars despite the technical issues.
This item is unusable for college class.
6/3/2008
This item requires a code to be registered on the web site in order to be used in a college class. Once the code is entered one time all other users are unable to use it again. I basically wasted my money on this item. I recomend that any item like this that is used not be purchased if you are using it for a college class. I am hoping to resolve this with the seller soon!