I have a 4’27” single-track CD Ithaca which is a recital
of the C.P.Kavafis
poem performed by Sean Connery, with
backing music by Vangelis.
Windowsmedia, via WMP10, identifies it as the Madonna album American Life
[Clean] [sic], which at 10-tracks must be ~10 times as long. So all the
cover art for American Life has been
downloaded to my Ithaca
folder, overwriting the folder.jpg file which I had already created some 4 months ago when
I’d uploaded the correct details for this limited edition disk to the Windowsmedia database-in-the-sky. I really can’t see
where WMP settings get the right to overwrite my data, if it is set to only add
“missing” information. At least I’d taken the trouble to also
embed the correct album image in the WMA file using the Advanced Tag Editor, and that is what I see displayed in WMP.
(Side-excursion: If I click the Buy CD
link in the Media Information sub-pane, of Now Playing pane, then sometimes I
get taken to an white embedded display which tells me there are no online
stores for my location, and sometimes I get taken to a grey embedded display
which gives me a choice of buy.com, walmart.com, A&B Sound Online and CDNOW
to get my copy of American Life [Clean].
Now, if WMP hadn’t already decided
that it knew what album this was, the link would be to Find Album Info.
Instead, I have to right-click on the track and use the context menu).
As you set
out for Ithaca
hope that your journey is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Using the Find Album Wizard, I go hunting
for the information I uploaded many months ago. I search
- on the title, but locate a different album;
- on Artist = Sean
Connery: nothing found
- on Artist = Vangelis : this gives me 5 hits
- Exact match Vangelis (Electronica
& Dance : 87 albums)
- Exact match Vangelis (2 albums)
- Exact match Vangelis (NewAge
: 11 Albums)
- Exact match Vangelis (25 albums)
- Vangelis Papazoglou (World: 1 album)
Now I really don’t know why I
don’t just see:
- Exact match Vangelis
(125 albums)
- Vangelis Papazoglou (1 album)
- which can
dramatically reduce the number of pages I have to navigate to find the correct
album.
At first I thought it might have been that
the information as drawn from different info vendors (AMG, AMGClassical,
Muze, CDJournal, AkiMusica, etc) but these are mixed up within each grouping,
and really the end-user doesn’t
care. It should be trivial for the server-side of this operation to consolidate
this data, but then someone has to care enough about something called
“fit and finish” to do these sorts of things. Believe me, if
another company did this sort of thing, a Microsoft marketing person would capture
it in a competitive analysis slide, and there would be much self-righteous
tittering and tut-tutting at team planning meetings for the company’s own
effort.
But I digress…
No match found in these 125 records, so
I’m going to re-upload the data.
Album Name = Ithaca
Artist Type = Single Artist/Group
Artist Name = Sean
Connery & Vangelis
Genre = Miscellaneous
Track details
- Title = Ithaca Performer = Sean Connery; Vangelis Composer = C.P. Cavafy;
Vangelis
There’s no way for me to upload
information about label, release date etc or album art. After I’m done, I
click Finish, hold my breath, and
…oh shit…
“Service unavailable” message:
“The service is not available at this time, click Close and try again later. “ But wait, there is nowhere to
hold the information I just typed in!! Have you ever had this after typing in
information for a CD with 30 tracks. Let me tell you:
I have.
Status: nothing changed. I want to see if
- my new album data will ever be uploaded
- if it can survive mangling in the database to be available for
later search/download
- if the current
Madonna album art will be deleted as soon as I upload the correct data (as
it should understand that what it brought down before is wrong wrong wrong). I can manually
fix it, as noted it my previous blog entry, but
a proper handling of this album transaction
should require that the album art be corrected as well.