Forums:

1. Theres is a HUGE forum with a vast array of posts topics in
http://www.good-music-guide.com/

(classical only site despite the name , or because of it..)click on Forum - also contains toplists, cd reviews,composer biographies ect.To access forums u need to fill out registration by giving a valid email(gimmick used to encourage you to comeback).

2. Theres a new site
http://www.classicalcommunity.net/

replete with forums biographies, great infrastructure; awaits contributors... This unlike 1. has an associated classical chat channel on IRC see below. To access forums u need to fill out registration by giving a valid email(gimmick used to encourage you to comeback).

3. There are several clssical forums on USENET news groups. Use google groups to browse them easily.

Chat mediums:

1. Yahoo chat has a fairly large chat rooms for classical with the ability to broadcast the music you are listening to the whole room. Great way introduce yourself yo new music. But due to yahoos` lack of room control features there are a lot of ad/spam `bots` that exploit the rooms. (and some of the people using the rooms have issues bt there are a lot of musicians, composers there)

http://yahelite.org/deep/files/yahelite/

to download client without ads or use yahoo
messenger program.

2. IRC ( www.mirc.com - to download a client)

once the client is installed - irc://irc.ircsuper.net:6667/classicalmusic

in your browser will take you to the rooms.

This is an attempt at trying to start online chat by the guys in the forum discussed above.
(the channel is on ircSuper network channel #classicalmusic)

IRC chat has complete moderation and won`t suffer from the problems at yahoo if it kicks off.
People with spare bandwidth are needed to idle in chat to make the channel appear higher up in peoples searches hence get even more people)

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The classical community in the net is rather divided and isolated; tell people on forums you visit of all other resources you know.

There hasn`t really been a sucessfull attempt at starting classical realtime chat (yahoo one has moderation issues)
and cd companies tend to flood the net with biased data recordings
with no discussion about actual pieces.

Feel free to add any other classical forums ect you are aware of.
Add urls and instructions on using.

cheers,
trans