In an earlier post I mentioned AllMusic as a great website for comprehensive music information (biographies, discographies, etc). Well I don't recommend it anymore...unless you still use Internet Explorer. But I definitely can't recommend doing that, so it looks like I have to have to rescind the recommendation altogether.
Allmusic did a big site redesign, and on my visit I was greeted with a little message at the top saying that the site was designed for IE 5.5 or higher. All the tables (with the useful information) are sized incorrectly and information is squished, covered up, or truncated because of the non-standard layout. Well I guess they decided to screw Mac and Linux users, along with the enlightened windows users who have left IE behind.
So I left a comment about the bad site design, and if you used (or still use) AMG, you should leave a comment telling them using propriety web pages is, well, stupid. I didn't word it that way, but I got my point across. Anyway, now I'm on the hunt for new music catalog sites, lest I fire up IE in desparation. I moved from the venerable CDNOW to AMG at some point, I guess it's just time to move again.
A quick google search for the "the IMDb of music" found me a bunch of blogs referring to AMG, but nothing new. At least one other person shares my opinion on the matter. If you find any good sites, leave a comment here.
Edit (7/16): So if you go to the site now it works. Looks like they've changed it within the past 2-3 days. It was messed up a little, but didn't have the message at the top when I wrote the post. I did see the IE-only message in the day or two before this post. I kind of liked the old interface a little better, but maybe it'll just take me some time to get used to this one.
Posted by ramk at July 15, 2004 09:41 PMAll music did do a redesign, which is sad, cus their older site was much more functional. This could just be one of those times, ram, where you swallow your pride, cross your fingers, and take a dangerous and wild ride on IE to allmusic.com. as brief as possible of course.
Posted by: jackson at July 15, 2004 11:22 PMUmm, I am using Firebird and I don't think I am seeing the issue. All of the information I usually look for and all of the tables seem to be rendered correctly.
Posted by: Gabe at July 16, 2004 07:55 AMOkay, after using the new Allmusic site for a bit longer, I have to say...I really like it. I don't know why, but I haven't experienced any of the problems with it that Ram or G have. It renders correctly in Firefox, and it seems to load very quickly. The streaming samples seem to load really quickly too and I have decided that I like the new layout.
Posted by: Gabe at July 16, 2004 11:14 PMYeah, it's working fine for me too now (see edit above). I'm guessing the interface will grow on me, but I haven't had much of chance to use it yet. I haven't found where the MARC format files are that Tag&Rename uses to tag albums.
Posted by: Ram at July 17, 2004 01:00 PM