Conference marvin::uk_music

1348.0. "Microsoft Music Central CD-ROM." by BBPBV1::WALLACE (Plan, Implement, Check, Act.) Wed May 01 1996 22:36

    I haven't seen anything in here about Microsoft's Music Central. Maybe
    I missed it.
    
    Anyway, for the benefit of anyone who's been tempted:
    
    Save your money, buy some real CDs instead. Or subscribe to Q. Or both.
    
    On paper, it looks like there's a lot in it. And in quantity, maybe
    there is. But, unless I've seriously misunderstood it, both
    presentation and content are seriously underwhelming:
    
    The user interface is crap: e.g. no point having a display bigger than
    640x480, as NOTHING can be resized. Which leaves many of the album and
    article titles ridiculously truncated when browsing the contents.
    
    The querying is crap. Besides the inability to resize windows, you can
    only choose to query the things they've hard-coded in to the program.
    You can't, for example, find Beatles albums pre 1967 (not that anyone
    should need to...).
    
    The online updates are crap: IF you can find them, they ship in an
    uncompressed format so they cost you a fortune to download. Once you
    get them, there's no easy way of finding out "what's new this month",
    so far all the content I've seen is text, the quality and quality
    control of the content is poor (many LPs listed with nothing more than
    a songlist, some with only placeholders where the content folks forgot
    the cut and paste).
    
    The content isn't earth-shattering: It consists primarily of an LP
    catalogue with songlists (sometimes), artist credits (sometimes),
    reviews from Q (sometimes) and biographies (sometimes). You can also
    look at it as discographies. There are a _very_ limited number of AVI
    movies, a few short song samples, and a slightly larger number of
    artist pictures.
    
    The export facility is crap: all you can export is text (no pictures,
    no movies).
    
    And so on.
    
    If you want to read reviews from Q, why not buy Q. (I did, for the
    first few years). At least Q has a bit more content (though it's even
    harder to search than the CD). Q doesn't have AVI movies and 30second
    music samples (but there's no real reason why it shouldn't nowadays if
    they wanted to).
    
    Like so much PC software, it's all about surface glitz rather than
    actual content. Bill Gates marketing machine rules, OK ?
    
    Anybody seen Penguin's RocknRom ? Most PC places haven't even heard of
    it, and Penguin's usual outlets don't stock it.
    
    regards
    john