While using The Godfather with AMG (allmusic.com) to do tagging, it seems that they completely changed their site and it no longer works.

Dang.

You may have to wait for a new verison of The Godfather. AMG is being completely redesigned.

Yea, and the new redesign complete sucks. They took a perfectly fine database and turned it into a commercialized piece of garbage. It takes so much longer to navigate in terms of finding what you're looking for (artist, album information, tracks, reviews), the site doesn't support Mozilla browsers (correctly), there so much more advertising, some of the features require registration, yada yada yada. I can't stand the look and feel. Anyone know of a music database that was comparable to allmusic.com? I'm going to be lost without this site....

What daffy said.

I'm bitterly disappointed with the new AMG.

I used to use the site every day, and now I don't know what do to.

Its' incredible that they'd actually make the site non-Firefox compatible, especially in the same week that Firefox is at its most popular, with the recent bad publicity around IE.

OK, I got it to work again (temporarily anyway):

Where Godfather is installed, edit the tgf.ini file. Under [AMG]/homepage, change the url to http://allmusic.com/. Apparently, it still brings up the old interface.

I don't expect this to last long though. There's even a banner on the page saying the new changes are coming.

I'm quickly doing a bunch of tagging tonight.

I actually like the new AMG site (improved layout, audio samples), but the IE requirement also really pisses me of.

Actually, for a site with the scope and popularity of AMG, and now that even CERT recommends users to switch to non-IE browsers, this is unforgivable, IMHO.

Maybe Microsoft is funding the upgrade.

Regards,
Madrigal

Even in IE6 its a nasty site. A great example of how to stuff up a perfectly good concept by adding unnecessary bells and whistles. No chance of getting me to register!

.dd.

Absolutely.

From the few people I talked with no one likes the new design.
I do not like it also because now I would have to rewrite the parsing code, on top of that the info is dispersed into tabs, so the page needs to be loaded 2-3 times to get tracks, review and credits.
They could have provided a more compact way to view the info , it takes a lot of time to reload those pages, anyway I never liked the pseudo tabbed interface on web pages , it just wastes bandwidth, tabs are for real programs not web pages, and especially on the case with album info and AMG it makes no real sense to break apart the data. Maybe the company that designed the site had an already some working code and applied it to AMG.
Also if you have XP with 'clear type' enabled the home page displays some weird text on a lot of entities.
It also takes a huge time for the site to load and it just uses too much java for my taste.
But
Anybody can sign up for free or even become an AMG insider and start mailing the people there with what they like and what they do not, actually they wanted beta testers trough the AMG insiders thing to help them decide how the new layout will be.

Anyway the harm is done, I know of no other site like AMG as far as music information goes so , lets just try to get the minimum damage possible.

The real travesty is that their 'advanced search' ain't so advanced and infact its worse than the original search. If only you could provide multiple search items such as song title + artist..

Its so pisses me off that they came from this

Gracenote is o.k. since you can enter multiple search items but other than the bacis stuff their isn't any other good metadata

Im really waiting for either of these companies to really use the power of their databases. Supposedly they are both licensing this technology but I haven't seen it show up in any hardware or software at all!!!

I'm also disappointed with the new AMG page. It sucks big time.

I had to google instead for a couple times because the AMG page wouldn't load and it gave me way too much timeout errors when finally did. Also the "IE only" (amazing isn't it?) coupled with the "True Type blurring" is pretty absurd too.

Hope they fix it. Right now is close to useless to me.



Enjoy!

IE only? Java? I don't believe that...

Ok, I just looked and there is no java on the new All Music Guide. As on all websites there is a fair amount of javascript (no relation at all to java), but I suspect that the comment about there being "so much java" was actually referring to the flash content.

I kind of like it.

I checked out the site with both Firefox and IE. It actually looks and feels kind of nice, IMHO, in IE (when the site works, of course). The site looks and acts like turds with Firefox.

But if AMG thinks I'm going to switch to IE to use their site, they've got another thing coming. I'd rather gnaw my own arm off than switch to IE from Firefox (well, almost).

OMG, I'm crushed. The new site SUCKS! Click, click, click, click, click.

my first post here is about how much i hate the new site too
i dont even have IE installed right now so damn
i hate it
i only TOLERATED it before
now its terrible

Take a look here it might help you get by for a while.

Nobody else has mentioned it so I may as well: The new AMG site has also stuffed up the very useful import function in Tag&Rename, which really pisses me off!

.dd.

This site may be of some limited use, during AMG's re-growing pains.

Regards,
Madrigal

Allmusic responded about the design, slow loading times and browser compatibility.

I think this was a reasonable response, and that we should all exhibit the patience they are asking for.

Regards,
Madrigal

Their new site looks alot better.

The slow load times are the only thing that pisses me off. I like the new navigation on the upper most banner. Alsot the moods and themes sections. Also registering is a pain but no big deal because its the most reliable database I've used.

I get "Page Not Found, Please Try Again". What did it say?

I wanted to read this topic and I could not find it , to my surprise someone moved it to off topic (next to some topics like 'Do you fear death' ... ) from general audio with out even having the moved entry.
Why is that? who decides things like that ?
I would like a reasonable explanation.

The topic quickly evolved into a thread about how much the design of that page sucks etc., giving it an OT character. As we haven't found a way to make "Moved:" links disappear after some time from the original forum to not clutter it (for this topic will likely be obsolete in 2 weeks time), i decided to move it without leaving a link, aware that the experienced members replying here would surely find it again in a jiffy.

The page is gone alright. In short it said something in the lines of:

- They are a small company with small company resources, although everbody thinks they are some big time players.
- They made the new design first compatible with the most popular browser used by their visitors (IE) and that they will work on support for other browsers.
- Slow loading times were the result of the doubling of their visitors when the new design was launched and that they are working on more server capacity.
- They thaught they would get a little more credit and patience from their regular users. It seemed they recieved a lot of bitching like in this thread.

FWIW, the site now seems to support Firefox.

Yahoo! uses information taken from AMG.

http://shopping.yahoo.com/b_music_14612517...

That's where I'll be going unless AMG fixes their new site.

I wasn't sure whether to post this in the 'Off Topic' section or 'General Audio'. I decided to put it here since it deals with an audio related topic.

Is it just me or does anyone thing that the new AMG (allmusic.com) site sucks?

Tag&Rename has released a new version which now uses the SOAP+XML interfaces of Amazon.com to retrieve album information, BTW. Dumped allmusic.com altogether, it looks like. Version 3.1.5. It gets album art, all the data (except for Genre for some reason... probably a bug), the review for the comments field, etc. Also looks like it gets stuff like copyright info, fills in an Amazon URL into the file if you want it to, whole bunch of extra stuff. Kinda neat. Interface is certainly faster than the allmusic.com functionality used to be, but there is quite a bit less album selection, as some of my more esoteric stuff Amazon does not have. Still, it's useful again.

http://www.softpointer.com

god yes, i'm not one to whine, but well it's a disaster. the flash at the top of every page ruins performance on my system, and is useless, and means can't have many pages open like i used to, 2nd there's a bright error msg at the bottom of every page saying i'm using unsupported browser (i use Opera or Firefox only, what's with this optimised of IE shit, that's very 1998). 3rd it takes more clicks to get to any info, is spread over many pages.. can you tell from this i'm not liking the redesign? at all. what we're they thinking. Oh yes, and the final thing, it really wants you to log in.

I guess i shouldn't whine 'cos they provid(ed) a free service, but really - such a shame to see it change for the worse. i was looking forward to something better aswell.

while we're off topic and talking about music sites, does anyone know what happened to echocloud.net?

Agreed. It's a disaster. There was nothing wrong with the old design. Now it's gotten sloooow, cluttery and messy....

Discussed in this thread actually. It is simply horrible. If only I could access the old site for a day so that I could download the entire database tree to browse locally.

I am sure they must have understood their mistake after the hits they get dropped drastically.

The frontpage for the old version is accessable through archive.org... but sadly, when any search is performed it routes the request through the newer version.

- M.

The words poo, doo-doo and ka ka come to mind. Why don't people leave well enough alone. If it ain't broke......leave it the way it is.

rs

I have another problem, since 3-4 days now I have to re write the credentials in order to log in.

I have all cookies enabled and even added amg to trusted sites.

Any of you have that problem ?

For those who prefer the old AMG layout

http://www.petitiononline.com/pangoamg/petition.html

Yep, I have this problem too. Quite annoying, I hope it gets fixed.

Other than that, I don't really have a problem with the new AMG, and I kinda like the new layout and features.

The new layout is truly akward. Time consuming, non-practical, less efficient. The only good thing I can think about it is the implemented option to listen to samples of the songs. Other than that, they made all the wrong choices, wasting a nice interface. Bring back the good old AMG or choose a totally different perspective...just drop this layout altogether.

Glad I am not the only one with that problem.

Anyhow the chances for reverting to the old layout are non existent.

A more realistic approach would be to make the site smarter for slower connections.
They could get rid of the flash animation/search selector and they could use frames to avoid reload all the upper part of the page including the search form tabs etch.

Adds can still be displayed with no problem.

And the new content is nice plus the fact that I can listen to parts of the songs makes it a more robust database. I wish they bring back the related albums section though.

i wrote amg using the "contact" form on their site. i wrote quickly, so it wasn't exactly eloquent, but here is what i said:

"The new site is terrible! Why the change?! AMG used to be the perfect resource to quickly get to a *single* page where you could see the entire discography, biography, and a photo of the artist. Now the user must click through a series of pages, which is a severe nuisance. Having everything divided makes the site a major pain to use for quick reference. I thought I might be the only one who thought this, until a friend asked me "why in god's name did allmusic do that to their site?" Please change it back to the old format! The old site could possibly use some cosmetic changes, but NOT drastic usability changes."

At least they (somehow) fixed Firefox/Mozilla display/behaviour.

I am starting to get used to the new layout. The site's usability improves with time and adjustment, I guess. It would be nice if you could disable the CPU-intensive parts of the site: the Flash bit at the top and the fancy javascript rollover "features". I almost always have many apps open on my machine at once and I like to keep allmusic running in the background as reference so I prefer a low-overhead site, which the redesign is not.

My "anger" is tempered a little because the site is free and has always been free and only God knows how many times I've hit their database over the years for info.

And one thing I like is that the search add-on for Firefox still works. I use that a lot.
I would still prefer something less "flashy", though.

I'm sure the old site will never come back, so our only choice is to nag them into improving this one.

Well, I don't think the new site is all that bad, but I haven't used it much yet. The fact that it broke tag&rename support really sucks, though - I used that!

Topics merged. Sorry guys.

With my internet zone settings every page on the AGM site (except the main page)gave me a pop up window saying "An ActiveX control is not safe...."

I will never visit the AGM site again as it's too painful.