I've been playing around with the newly redesigned Allmusic.com for about a week now (if you were signed up for their newsletter you got a sneak peek), and I wanted to put out my thoughts on it, and ask a question as well.

First, I think they did a fine job in the design of the site. It seems a little slow in loading and searches, but that may just be me. The one layout change that I have a problem with is the need to click on so many things to get more information. What used to be on one page when you were looking at an album is now on three or four, though I like the other pages they've added, like top Billboard chart positions and Grammy awards.

I also love the one thing I've been waiting for for a couple years now, and that's the audio clips. I've been in several music stores that have listening stations that use AMG, and I always wished they could put their music clips on their main website as well. Well, now they have, and that's where I need help.

What application is supposed to be able to play these clips? I have a whole lot of codecs installed, yet WMP cannot play them. What's even more frustrating is that I set Firefox up to only use mplayer for media files, but I can't get it to stop using WMP. Of course, I'm still not certain how to use mplayer for streaming content. So, anyone know how it works?

So, after using Allmusic for nearly 8 years now, it's nice to see them trying to change things around and add to their site, and I think the effort produced both good and bad changes. At least the public release of the site didn't have the problems the sneak peek had. every single link on the site was not useable in Firefox or any browser other than IE. Good thing they changed that

Yeah, their audio previews are definitely funky. Its a shame they didn't just use mp3s. I tried to play a couple of the previews (on my mac) using mplayer and it didn't like either one. VLC played one, but not the other. The one that it did play took forever to start playing and then skipped a lot which may be related to their site in general seeming really slow. Anyway, you might try VLC.

-Mike

NOOOOOOoooooo o oo o o o . . . . . .. .

Now allmusic.com is even LESS compatible with my sorry old Netscape. So incompatible that it crashed the poor thing. As if their change to IE-only scrolling artist info text box was bad enough. And their javascript-only which prevented me from opening links in new windows. ::sigh::

First I lost my main source for music info after maybe 5 years of use; cdnow.com. Now my only other source for music info has become less accessible.

::sigh:: Now I REALLY have to take a few days off work to get my machine up to Win2k with Mozilla and all that.

You don't like to change software do you.

I didn't have any problems playing the audio clips in WMP. Odd.

Which version? The thing that's annoying me is that I can't choose which player the clips load in. I think it might be whatever is my Windows default player, which is still WMP6.4

I'll try setting some of the defaults to mplayer. Maybe that will work. mplayer plays audio files, right?

*edit*
Okay, got it to work. I did have to download the WMP9 setup, which suprisingly didn't affect WMP6.4 as my default player for most extensions. It does, however, pop up whenever I click on the audio clip icon on Allmusic. That's fine with me. Too bad you only get a clip that's both a horrible bitrate, and about 15 seconds long. One or the other would have been nice.

It doesn't work for me on win2k with Opera 7.23, which is a total bummer

Hey, where in the new allmusic does it show the similar artists? Is that now a service I need to register for? I can't seem to find it... If anyone knows, please let me know.

What artist are you looking for? I just did a quick search for my favorite band, and it lists similar artists right under group members. Then again, I'm auto-logged-in as a registered member.

Wow, how the hell did I miss that. I guess I wasn't thinking it would be text since it used to be a row of album covers. Ah well - thanks!

Here is an extension for Firefox that does some reformating of AllMusic.com

http://www.holovaty.com/blog/archive/2004/07/19/2210