Please please please, bring back the old Gramofile review archive!
Mon, Oct 4 2010, 7:43PM
#2
RE: Home RE: Home
It is now over 6 months since chesheja started this valuable thread and 5 months since it dried up, but the key issue still remains. Despite recent innovations, it was the very oldest feature that was the most useful and valuable to collectors – Gramofile. Nothing has replaced the instant search facility for composers, works and artists that provided the kind of easy referencing for collectors' comparative considerations.
Even the Archive has lost much of its practical value, since it has now become impossible to run off PDF reviews or articles. Much of what is going on appears to be technological bling, attractively decorative, but not the maximum carat. Gramophone Player might be novel, but I need to hear music on a disc through my Arcams/B & Ws so that I can get a real impression of what the recording might actually sound like, were I to buy it. I simply don't want to listen to things sitting at a computer, and I certainly don't feel the need for all the gizmos to link it up. Yes... I know... get back in the teapot. However, one thing I am sure about is that serious collectors really do crave access to informative articles and reviews and the facility to call up comparative searches.
Sat, Oct 16 2010, 6:36PM
#3
RE: Home RE: Home
I too would welcome the return of Gramofile. The
search functions within Gramofile were far more useful (usable?) than
those currently offered by the Archive.
David
Sat, Nov 13 2010, 5:10PM
#4
RE: Please please bring back the old Gramofile!
What was so wrong with the old Gramofile? it was easy to use even for an IT blunderer like me. Looking up works I was interested in was simply by composer, work, record label and / or number etc. Then followed relevant reviews. Excellent and very useful for comparisons. Then came the weird development where the site seemed unable to print any words with apostrophes without coding them with a strange combination of letters and symbols making the reviews almost impossible to read. This was bad enough but now...!!! The so-called 'search' facility only has one box and the so-called 'advanced' search is full of irrelevant and confusing tick boxes. I couldn't find anything useful even for the relatively straightforward work Schubert's Mass in G. (Can anyone help with this, especially if you can direct me to the wonderful old 50's mono version by the Robert Shaw Chorale on (I think) RCA Victor?)
Sat, Nov 13 2010, 5:20PM
#5
RE: Please please bring back the old Gramofile review archive!
Amusingly, after writing the above I just put 'Schubert's mass in G Robert Shaw Chorale' into Google and was immediately directed to the Gramofile website and the relevant review from 1956! Now why couldn't Gramofile have done that?!
Sun, Nov 14 2010, 11:49AM
#6
Gramofile review archive!
Echoed in full!!
Sun, Nov 14 2010, 10:45PM
#7
RE: Gramofile review archive!
MODERATED - due to use of swear word. See House Rules point 2.
One point that does not seem to have been made in either of the threads on this topic is that the problem is not OCR as such, but the software that Gramphone used to do the OCR. It is possible to download the PDF files for each issue and "re-OCR" them with Adobe Acrobat. Doing this is slow, but the results are impressive and entirely usable for searching. This is probably true for Abbyy or Omnipage too. Maybe the software used (and I don't know what it was) was just not up to the job.