From: aa699@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Tony Thomas)
Subject: CD Guide (Reviewed by Tony Thomas)
Reply-To: aa699@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Tony Thomas)
Organization: Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH (USA)
Date: Wed, 12 Aug 92 20:00:49 GMT


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                        CD-ROM REVIEWS
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                         CD GUIDE

                            by

                        Tony Thomas


 
Putting a music CD guide on CD-ROM seems like a logical idea.  Having
information on thousands of audio CD titles at your fingertips can be a
great convenience when doing research or for seeing what's available.
WGE's CD Guide falls far short of delivering the goods, however.
 
First of all, to my surprise, after paying about $40 for this disc, I
found that about half of the reviews were "locked" up tight due to an
encryption scheme.  What do you have to do to unlock them?  Simply pick
up the phone and have a credit card handy. $14.95 later, you'll get the
secret code to unlock these reviews.  (Something that I refuse to do!)
 
Although password encryption has been commonplace in the CD-ROM world
for expensive applications and for product delivery (as in the case of
the very expensive Adobe type library), I believe that using them in low
end applications like the CD Guide is tantamount to extortion.  It is a
dangerous trend that should be resisted at all costs.
 
To make matters worse, the disc is full of advertising in the way of a
handful of audio snippets and album cover graphics from companies that
presumably paid for the privilege.  There are also a number of outright
ads from CD accessories manufacturers and various other companies as
well.  Certainly being subjected to all this paid advertising should
earn me a password to unlock all the encrypted reviews!  (Where's my
Superman secret code ring when I need it?)
 
To make matters still worse, the reviews that are there are too short
and sketchy and there aren't many of them.  Usually, all you get is the
artist, title, label, and little else.  Oh yes, sometimes you get an
American Bandstand-esque 1 to 10 magazine rating and a similar reader
rating for performance and sound quality.   I would rather have an in
depth review to support the numbers.    Such things as album
producer(s), engineer(s), studio(s) and musician lineups are sorely
missing.  The disc's search engine is unbearably slow (it seems to be
run time Clipper code) and I got "out of environment space" errors even
after increasing my computer's environment space to huge levels.
 
The information you get from the CD Guide can be found in Schwann and
Schwann Spectrum at a much lower price.  Plus, the information will be
much more up to date.  For reviews, there's always Rolling Stone, Stereo
Review, Audio and the paper version of the CD Guide and similar
publications (plus a number of great books).  The CD Guide is a great
concept that fails miserably in this implementation.
 
Rating= Zero Stars
 
CD Guide
WGE Publishing
 


-- 
aa699@Cleveland.Freenet.EDU/GEnie=A.THOMAS16/Compuserve:71541,3456
TONY THOMAS - SIGop - Audio Arts SIG - Cleveland FreeNet
"True riches is not what you have - It's the kind of person you are"

Newsgroups: alt.cd-rom