CLASSICAL music is finally embracing the download. Classical music devotees have traditionally been more, well, traditional in their attachment to actual physical recordings.

But downloadable music is now a real option, even as record companies keep issuing CDs and DVDs, many more than even most lovers of classical music can keep up with, let alone critics whose business it is to try. So this year the classical music critics of The New York Times had plenty of options when selecting their favorite recordings of 2013.

We kept the ground rules the same as before: each critic could pick up to five recordings (a CD, a DVD, a download); and, to promote variety, no overlaps were allowed. Several of us, myself included, wanted to pick the recording of George Benjamin’s “Written on Skin,” the most remarkable new opera to come along in years, but the youngest of the Times critics, Zachary Woolfe, was the speediest about making choices, so that one fell to him.

Even as I bemoaned my tardiness, the collective list is breathtaking in its diversity, everything from a recording of early Medieval songs by Machaut, performed by the Orlando Consort, to the American composer (and Alaska resident) John Luther Adams’s engrossing environmental piece “Inuksuit,” recorded by 34 percussionists in a forest in Vermont, available as a CD, a DVD or a download.