allmusic.com use improvement suggestions

[Agrajag]

guys, allmusic.com is a pain-in-the-@@@....

apparently if there are more hits returned for any given search, they only show you a partial list. for example, the album "greatest hits", which of course is extremely common, ends showing matches for bands starting with letter "b"!!! anyone past that? tough. you can't add them.

so there appears to be no way to add album thumbnails and info for say these examples:

the beatles 1967-1970 (allmusic drops all dates so this can't even be found at all except by going through the band first.)
electric light orchestra - definitive collection (too many named that)
chicago - greatest hits 1982-1989 (dropping the dates, this becomes gh again)
bonnie tylery - super hits (too many named that too)
neil diamond - the greatest hits 1966-1992 (drop "the" and the dates...)

very frustrating....

does allmusic support passing artist and album?

meanwhile i see that ultimate band list, now called artist direct (www.artistdirect.com) has no trouble finding any of these, provides complete listings, track listings, song samples in wma and rm formats and includes album reviews, band reviews, artist thumbnails and album thumbnails. allmusic.com has the thumbnails but if you can't get to them, what good are they?

would it be prudent to consider moving this feature over to artist direct? we'd actually end up with a higher degree of positive hits unless a way can be found to get the searches to work on allmusic.com.

at the least perhaps it would help to support searching for albums by album or artist....

[tslayer]

you know, there are nicer ways to go about posting something than having a title of:

"allmusic.com useless as is".

i for one usually skip over such postings.

how about a title next time of:

"my issues with the allmusic.com search"

i know you're frustrated, but there are going to be bugs, so you'll have to live with that. but, considering this is open source and nobody is getting paid for a living doing this, you should consider a softer approach to reporting bugs.

thanks for understanding.

ts

[Agrajag]

sorry ts. didn't mean anything regarding it but you are right regarding the frustration level.

for what it's worth, i've e-mailed them to see if there's a solution in the hopes of helping out but i don't anticipate a reply based on the way they worded the comment when you e-mail them.

keep up the good work.

[Odrike]

i have to agree that www.allmusic.com has limitations. thats nothing that the dev of xbmc can be blamed for. but a great feature suggest would just be implemtation of grabbing thumbs from the promising database of http://www.artistdirect.com

[Bobbin007]

@all: i just want to clarify (no flame intended), this is not a bug in xbmc, its an allmusic.com issue. as described in x-s post allmusic.com album info works / doesn't work (http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?showtopic=215985), xbmc does the same as if you go to allmusic.com with a browser, enter the album name from your tag into the edit box, select the radio button albums and press "go". if you do this on your pc and you don't get the result you expect, xbmc wouldn't find it either. and there is nothing we can do about it. :(

does allmusic support passing artist and album?
imo it doesn't, you only have the radio buttons on the webpage. if you enter a albumname and a artist and do a album search, you get completely other result, not even the album with the title you've entered. i think we have to live with it as it is.

greets

bobbin007

[Agrajag]

it really is pretty annoying (allmusic) as it is now. it just doesn't meet the need of the intended feature.

for what it's worth, i got the following reply from them to a message asking if these issues are fixable:

"thanks for your feedback. we are in development on a number of new features that just may address your request. stay tuned. your wish may be granted. we hope you continue to visit, and enjoy, allmusic.com."

of course that doesn't tell us much of anything except that changes are coming but what changes and when are unknown.

[t029248]

i'm also not too pleased with the allmusic section. it gives the information, but too many results. in the *winamp now playing window this is handled better. i assume it’s using more info from the id3 tags. it also would be nice to select the songs from the track view and play them, when the are in the album. not owned item grayed out.

i agree with tslayer that this is open source not even version 1.0.
xbmc is already far more feature complete then anything available right now.
with a 200 $ xbox you can do more then with a 2700 $ windows media center pc.
it’s already the best multi media player and it getting better all the time.
we all need to be patient trying to be happy with every extra future feature.

[Agrajag]

in my case, ultimately, believe it or not, my frustration is actually a compliment. i've seen the phenomenon many times in my development life. if a software product is just average, people aren't all that hard on it. they just accept it for what it is and have very low expectations of it.

with xbmc, these guys have done such an amazing job that they've entered into the vicious cycle of now having our full attention. things that don't work are no longer trivial but instead stick out like a sore thumb. what i mean by that is that now we're closing in on a total solution that is quickly become as perfect as these things can be and thus, the areas where it still has issues stand out even more than if xbmc were just a crappy piece of average coding.

this is far from that. i am very glad we have this effort and if i could code anything myself i'd gladly help out.

that's what the allmusic thing is now. it's got all the potential but currently leaves you short of the destination. thus it's currently very frustrating.

btw, thank you whoever it was for changing the subject. i couldn't do it or i would have.