Gramofile - please can we have it back?

I'm in total agreement. I became so used to the Gramofile that I stored away my collection of Gramophone magazines, except for the last year. Now I often find myself in the basement looking for an old review that a year ago I could get in seconds through Gramofile.

Yes, I agree. The main problem is that the search facility is so woefully inadequate for such a large and complex database of material, and for such a knowledgeable clientele.  For example, there is no way (as there was with Gramofile, if I remember rightly) of searching by composer + work, surely the most obvious of searches of the archive, let alone by, say, genre. 'Advanced' indeed! Come on, Gramophone, this isn't Google, where we're perhaps prepared to tolerate quick and dirty searches. The basic principle of website design (indeed of all design) is that it does what is required of it. No amount of prettiness will make up for its absence.

Absolutely agree. The index & search are painful because the OCR has so many errors. Searching seems to be a crude AND of terms, and poor OCR means you don't know what has been missed, as well as many false hits (Mahler's Symphony 86, anyone?)

I could bear the awkward reading interface if it were backed by something like the previous database for searching.

I absolutely agree with this. Gramofile was really useful when trying to find info about cds no longer in the catalogue before buying on sites such as ebay.

I also totally agree that the demise of Gramofile is not a good thing, and very retrograde step.  Why remove it when it was such a comprehensive, obviously useful service and the only decent one of its kind?  The current site is useless for searching and finding reviews!

I also filed away (boxed in the attic) my 30+ years of Gramophone as I assumed I would no longer need them for review searches -  indeed was contemplating selling them - but obviously no longer!

Come on, please restore the Gramofile database as a matter of urgency, it was the most useful part and still would be of this site!

The Archive was released way before being ready for "prime time". The searches usually stall out on me (and I'm on a very high speed internet connection) and when I do find something it's oten garbled. Trying to "browse" a Gramophone issue is a joke. I can't believe with its reputation Gramophone would send something like this out into the web. Take a look at the beautiful job the New Yorker magazine does with its digital version -- going back to the 1920s! The Archive is a great idea and would be a wonderful resource for those of us who do not want or are not able to save years of back issues. Take it down and start over, please!

As a relative newcomer to the website, I have never used Gramofile; but I do find the Archive very un-user friendly when tracking down reviews.  First of all, the awful typos - presumably some poor soul had to transcribe the originals manually?  (My favourite so far is Bach's 'Easier Oratorio'.  I laughed out loud at that one.)  I often have to open the Acrobat version of the page to make sense of some particular piece of gibberish, only to find, for example, that the text under a photograph or an embedded quotation has been incorporated in the transcription.  Secondly, I have often been unable to find a particular review which I know must be there, because it has been mentioned in another review, for example, or in the Editor's Choice section, although it doesn't come up in the search.  When I eventually manage to find the page in the relevant issue the transcription usually tells me "There are no articles on this page" when there clearly are, as I discover when I click on 'View as Acrobat'.  It's pretty shambolic.