Gramofile - please can we have it back?

I find the new archive so frustrating for the purposes of finding (and reading) reviews that I have given up using it altogether.  Gramofile was absolutely excellent: so simple and quick to use, and so clearly presented. 

Dear Gramophone/Gramofile (to whom it may concern),

I have for some time been meaning to write to you on the subject of Gramofile.

I now find that the search options previously offered by Gramofile (by composer, title, artist, orchestra or when necessary, keyword)

, have been replaced when searching the Archive by keyword only. This latter is a notoriously blunt instrument, as my searches with it in various fields since the  1970s have repeatedly made clear. My I add my voice to those of your other correspondents asking for the original Gramofile search options to be restored?

A possible additional idea that occurs to me ( a source of income for you?) is the offer for sale of a regularly updated, searchable DVD of Gramofile. I acquired a CD-rom from you some years ago which I found very useful for retrospective searches, but of course it is now very out of date.

Yours sincerely,

Roger Davidge

Yet another voice joins the swelling chorus. I can see no-one taking a contrary view to those music lovers - many,like myself, subscribers - whom Gramophone (or Haymarket) has let down badly. Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of this question is the total silence on the subject from Gramophone and the utter disregard for their readers. This is the last pronouncement I can find from Martin Cullingford. It was in March and acn be read in full earlier on in this thread

We had to take it [Gramophile] down to protect the security both of our database, and of our site visitors. There are plans to return a reviews database to Gramophone - we are currently exploring how best to build it and to make it available to you. Your emphatic vote of support for its return has been noted, but for now I beg your patience.

Has anything actually happened since March? What is the latest position? Can Martin Cullingford (or anyone else at Gramophone) show some rudimentary grasp of customer service and let us know the answers to these questions?

JKH

Dear JKH,

I am sorry you feel this way about the team's responsiveness to reader queries. If you look through threads such as those related to the Gramophone Player you will see that I, plus my colleagues from the audio and technical arms of Gramophone, have engaged regularly with queries and conversation. We also endeavour to reply to as much as possible of the correspondence sent through the 'contact us' link - last week alone we replied to about 70 emails about the new Gramophone Player, as well as about the Archive search facility. To my knowledge I haven't received any communication about Gramofile of late, else I would have replied to it.

That said, to address your points, Gramofile's restoration remains a plan, but not one we are currently working on as the Player has taken up all our team's time recently - the team works very hard, but there are only so many people and resources, not to mention hours, we can draw on. However, to correct a point further up this thread, it is not a case of not wishing to admit we were wrong. On the contrary, the Archive is a project we are pleased to have brought (for free) to our readers. But it was never meant as a replacement for Gramofile, or to be used in the same way, and as I have said before, Gramofile's removal was the result of it being built in old code for a website launched a decade ago, which had become unstable and vulnerable to attacks.

If you wish to know more about the PDFs being removed from the Archive, may I point you to the following thread: http://www.gramophone.co.uk/forum/about-the-site/view-as-pdf-not-working

I hope this addresses some of the concerns you have, but if not, please feel free to contact me directly at gramophone.online@haymarket.com.

Best wishes,

Martin

I couldn't agree more. I frankly find the Archive useless. It was such a quick and easy method to check out recordings on-line! I often don't have the Classical Music Guide handy.

I also wish they would reintroduce other recording comparisons for each review, rather than waste time on cosmetic changes, that make the magazine more difficult to read.

I,too, find the archive pretty useless. I'm trying to find reviews of Die Schone Mullerin and it seems to be searching only on 'die'. (Perhaps the lack of umlauts is a problem? But can they be typed?) I had been specifically wondering what the opinion of the Jonas Kaufmann disc was, so I tried searching for Kaufmann and it doesn't appear. Surely it was reviewed?

Essentially the archive is very clunky and un-user-friendly. I don't doubt for that it's sometimes suitable for historical research, but for searching for reviews I'm afraid it is simply unusable.

I will just say that I share my fellow readers' disgust at Gramophone's incompetence on line.  It's not just a lack of technical ability.  As all of the complaints show, it's a fundamental failure to understand what the magazine's readers would want from a website and how they would want to use it.  I can understand that Gramofile had technical problems and had to be rebuilt.  But saying that Archive was never intended to replace Gramofile is just admitting that you got your priorities reversed, because you did not take the time to determine what your readers wanted.  Now, your readers are telling you that Archive is not what they want, and you keep telling us that you think its wonderful.  Get a clue.