Please please please, bring back the old Gramofile review archive!
Mon, Mar 29 2010, 4:48PM
Am I the only person who finds the new Gramophone.net Archive vastly inferior to the old Gramofile review archive? I used to be able to type in a work, narrow down by artist, label, time period, and very quickly find review(s) to compare, enabling me to make informed buying decisions. The new Archive is almost impossible to search - there seems to be no systematic meta-data to narrow down searches, and it brings up all sorts of erroneous results.
Maybe Gramophone would like me to be using the hard-copy guide to look at reviews, but that only has a small selection of all the reviews that have been in the magazine.
The Archive has its place for sure, but I think Gramofile could co-exist neatly with it.
Mon, Mar 29 2010, 5:45PM
#2
RE: Please please please, bring back the old Gramofile review ar
I wholeheartedly agree with you. There must be something Gramophone can do to make the new archives as user-friendly as the old ones. To make it even harder for me, my Broadband is more like fast dial-up (it seems fast only by comparison with the horrendous rural dial-up we had before) and it takes ages for pages to come up.
Mon, Mar 29 2010, 6:07PM
#3
RE: Home
I'm sorry you've been having problems with the archive, and you are correct in that the search facility doesn't use metadata but is based on a search of the full text (which does have advantages when it comes to searching features, which don't have metadata as such, rather than reviews). It is, however, possible to specify the article type you'd like the results to include - reviews, feature and so on - which should help narrow it down a bit. The size of the task - digitising 85+ years of issues, and then making the text searchable - was a vast one, and we hope the availability of that content, and the ability to browse it issue-by-issue, outweighs some of the frustrations for now. There are, however, plans to introduce a metadata-based review search, but that is part of the ongoing development I alluded too in my 'welcome' article. Martin.
Mon, Mar 29 2010, 6:15PM
#4
RE: Bring back Gramofile!
I absolutely agree. Gramofile might have had its problems, but the new archive is nearly useless. I cannot find what I want and have almost given up using the Gramophone website.I only came here today because I got the "relaunch" email.
When Gramofile appeared I happily ditched all my old hard copies of Gramophone. Now I just keep about a year's worth of back copies, but I don't use the archive at all. Perhaps after reading Gramophone, and other reviews for nearly 30 years, I am more sure of what I want anyway.
Mon, Mar 29 2010, 6:41PM
#5
Viva Gramofile.
I fully agree: for searching reviews, the Archive cannot match the earlier version of Gramofile. I keep getting irrelevant results when I search for a particular work, and so I gave up using it.
Mon, Mar 29 2010, 7:03PM
#6
RE: Home
I can't tell how much I miss the old Gramofile review which I used quite a lot before buying a cd or dvd!!
The new full text search is nice to have as additional search option, but not as an eloquent replacement.
Mon, Mar 29 2010, 8:26PM
#7
RE: Home
There is also another, longer thread on the same subject (bringing back Gramofile) in the "Recordings" Forum.
Mon, Mar 29 2010, 8:36PM
#8
RE: Home
Just to add my voice to the chorus of requests to bring back the old review archive. I don't think the main problem with the new one is the search function but it's the countless errors that crept in via the OCR software analysing the scans, which stop the indexing software from finding the important terms in many articles. I've often suggested corrections but the process is rather tedious, and it's not possible to mark more than one error at a time (or it wasn't when I last did it).
Mon, Mar 29 2010, 8:43PM
#9
RE: Please please, bring back the old Gramofile review archive!
agreed brother
Mon, Mar 29 2010, 8:51PM
#10
RE: Home
One of the srongest points of Gramophone was Gramophile. Here - without loosing a lot fo time I found my answers to most questions. In abolishing it and replacing it by a more than doubtful search system it has become quite complicated to find what I am searching for.
One additional complication i the poor scanning quality. In many cases names are distorted up to illegibility (e.g f???i). A serious search is no longer possible.
In special cases I tried to page from page to page. However this also is almost impossible. There are no provisions for jumping a section. You either have to start at the beginning or at the end and then work through hundreds of almost illegibly small page pictures! Impossible to move sensibly.
The last reneval of the subscription was hard to decide in view of the significantly reduced service offers of Grammophone. What about the next one?
Fri, Apr 2 2010, 3:58AM
#11
RE:
I agree with the above comments.
Review by work and artist - this is the only way to go.
I loved gramophile, even if it was not exhaustive. I find the new research tool useless also.
Hopefully this will be resolved soon.
Fri, Apr 2 2010, 7:40AM
#12
Bring back the old Gramofile review archive!
I can only ditto all the comments and points already made. I miss the old gramofile. In searching the archive I can't be confident that what I am searching for will be found...but I can be sure what I am not looking for will....Lee
Fri, Apr 2 2010, 10:58AM
#13
RE: Please please please, bring back...
Hello all. As there are two ongoing threads about Gramofile, I thought it worth directing readers of this one to my post in the 'Gramofile - please can we have it back' thread - scan down to post 23. I hope it might shed some light on many of the points here, even if not provide the answers you might all be looking for. Martin
Tue, Apr 20 2010, 10:20PM
#14
please, bring back the old Gramofile review archive!
Yes, I, too, have missed having the Gramofile. I'm sure I found the review some time ago for the Chandos "Opera in English" recording of "Figaro" in Gramofile. But now that I look for it again in the Archive, it's nowhere to be seen. At least I haven't been able to find it despite searching under various word combinations of "chandos", "mozart", "figaro", "parry", "purves", etc. If someone can find it, please reply with the issue date.
Tue, Apr 20 2010, 11:58PM
#15
RE: please, bring back the old Gramofile review archive!
The Chandos "Opera in English" recording of Figaro was reviewed in the 2004 awards issue of Gramophone, which is not in the Archive.
I am another person who finds the new Gramophone.net Archive vastly inferior to the old Gramofile review archive. I agree accurate searching is well nigh impossible.