Seems like the whole emusic site has died right now. Not so much as an oops or a we're working on something page. Just a DNS failure message and a string of numbers.
ETA: it's back. And Soft Moon is the free daily download.
Finally cut the cord, even refusing the free month offered. Ten years is long enough. It became such a hassle trying to leave little or no money in the account each month. I ended up buying boosters, using them over the three months they were good. On Monday, I used up the remainder of the booster that was to expire on Tuesday. I left $0.23 in the account, and even though it would roll over on tomorrow's refresh, I just decided that enough was enough.
Much to my surprise, it was easy. No sadness. No regrets. There is so much music on my computer that I haven't even heard. How senseless!
Cheers where due to eMu...I spaced out on my renew date, they kept those credits available for 24 hours as a courtesy.
Also happened to notice a big drop by Red Note Classical, which appears to consist of Soviet-era recordings by Russian and Eastern European orchestras. Wonder how they are?
Probably like all cheap Soviet archive material there's some gems in there.
I see among the Red Note releases are the Glazunov symphonies conducted by Vladimir Fedoseyev, about which I've read good things. The same performances have also been released by X5 and might be cheaper to get that way.
Anyone have any trouble getting on/using Emusic with Firefox 8.0? This week or so, I keep getting Oops message on every page and the rest doesn't display well, but even worse, I can't log on at all.
Interesting development at the emusic site - the personal recommendation engine seems to have gone: see here
This actually seems like kind of a big deal to me, for all the imperfections of what they had.
I had an email this morning from emusic asking me to do a survey - £5 credit, ie 12 tracks, for doing it so worthwhile. One of the many things they asked about was the value of personal recommendations, so it is in their plan to think about it. But I got the impression it was something that they valued. Maybe this is all part of clearing the decks for the upgrade?
Yes I just got the same! It now appears to be working again in the new style. I'll reserve judgement until I've looked at it a bit more!
edit - I can't get beyond the home page at the moment, other than the message board that has stayed exactly the same. That is the one aspect that needed a lot of updating!!
It is amazingly slow - I wanted to check some recent AAJ DOTD albums from Jonah, but I'll go back to it in a few hours when hopefully it will have settled down. Eventually it went to an OOPS page. I'll do something else instead!
This is actually a good sign - it shows that they've learned to implement a means of quickly reverting to the old interface, etc., when their rollout of new stuff inevitably doesn't work so good.
Can systematic multi-platform testing be far behind? We can only hope...
Just got the new look format - hated it! It's so freaking dark - From Spinal Tap - "It looks like death".
Pages took way longer to load, and the first time I hit Browse I got the Oops page again. Outstanding.
Best touch - your available credit is up in the right corner in tiny freaking characters. Way to go.
I had to navigate off the first page just to get my saved for later - and why is everything $6.99 now? And why sell me a 6.49 account when everything's 6.99? We are so breaking up again.
The new design is beyond a train wreck. I'm a bit gobsmacked at the scale of the wreckage at the moment. Time to tear away my horrified gaze and go to bed.
Wow, I thought the November Massacre last year was bad enough, but this year's model may break the bank. These people are idiots - it is the only conceivable explanation, or their heads are so firmly planted up their posteriors they cannot see the light of day.
Well, that is completely awful. Beyond the design, they have removed (it appears) all the vaguely personalised recommendations? Used to be "Your New Arrivals" on the New Arrivals page and also "Recommended for You" on the front page. This is particularly important for me because the vast majority of editorial picks are not available to download here, and those personalised selections only showed me what I COULD download. Now I can't find anything like that, leaving me with full page spruiking of stuff I can't get, even if I wanted.
And I can't even see ANY albums under genres anymore. Tried on Chrome and Safari.
I've just tried to download an album, but I can't actually do it - I get into a loop of log in, click download, then need to log-in again ad nauseum. I really will be considering leaving emusic if things don't improve. When I look at new releases I want to see then in alphabetical order by date, not what others are downloading. I am not influenced by popularity. It is truely awful - and I am ususally something time so I get used to it. For me this is never going to work. I suspect it is aimed at a much younger genration than me!!
Well, to be fair, it's aimed at people who have dedicated T1 lines, 2048x1028px monitors, multiple-core CPUs, high-end graphics cards with multiple GPUs, and one particular browser/OS/Java version combination which they're almost certainly not going to tell us.
In other words, the developers just did what they wanted, ignored whatever limited user feedback they got (if any), and that was that. If they want to stay in business much longer, they'll write this "redesign" off as a total loss and stick with what they had, not that that was all that great either. But whoever's driving this bus is clearly in it to please himself, or herself, and us customers can basically go screw themselves.
At least it has got the message board going again! I haven't seen this volume of posts over there since, well since the last time emuisc made significant changes - probably last Autumn. I've tried several times this morning (now lunchtime here) to try to navigate through emusic to use up some credit due to be used up in the next week and I am basically getting nowhere very slowly. I don't actually need the larger album covers, but they are taking ages to download and holding everything else up. I am more seriously thinking about giving up on emusic than I ever have done. I have one more drop of 150 tracks via Groupon vouchers in mid December and that is likely to be it unless something changes quickly!
You know what's really funny? I just got a rejoin offer and want to take it, but there is no link on it to actually rejoin. So I go directly to the site and click on "reactivate subscription". Same issue. I literally want to join and the new site is making that impossible.
I'm refraining from the gripe session over there to give them a chance to work it out, but it's pretty bad. Really slow, hard to navigate, links that don't work...Doesn't exactly instill confidence when it comes to trying a download!
Just tried the free daily DL, it's working fine...
Well I for one have always wanted emusic to be slower and much less user-friendly, so I'm happy.
Seriously though... Jesus. Every change they make is a significant step further away from common sense, especially for someone who downloads classical.
So now we have to use a little scroll bar to see all the tracks if there's more than about 12, and we can't see the full track title if it's "too long", and we have to mouse over a little i symbol to get things like composer and performer information.
How stupid do they want this site to be? As an example, I clicked on the artist name Michael Chance (an English countertenor) and eventually I'm greeted by a mostly black space perhaps where a picture or a biography might be, though the only information I get is "Years active: s". Plus on the side I get some YouTube videos. Almost as an afterthought, down at the bottom of the screen there's the word "Albums", with some other information completely obscured by the useless fucking player. I have to scroll down to find any albums.
So, blank space + Youtube videos > music. Got it.
WTF! The redesign is an optical nightmare: small letters that barely contrast against the background. The headaches I'll get from reading the site won't convince me to buy any music.
I was amused to see the video suggestions for the jazz guitarist John Moulder. This one's my favorite...Maybe he's working on getting that sound out of his guitar!
I realize that these wrong video suggestions were there before, but they were buried down the page. They actually have a very nicely curated YouTube channel now, which you can reach by clicking the link.
Comments
ETA: it's back. And Soft Moon is the free daily download.
At least that works...
Much to my surprise, it was easy. No sadness. No regrets. There is so much music on my computer that I haven't even heard. How senseless!
says the gal who still getst he daily freebie ; )
Also happened to notice a big drop by Red Note Classical, which appears to consist of Soviet-era recordings by Russian and Eastern European orchestras. Wonder how they are?
I see among the Red Note releases are the Glazunov symphonies conducted by Vladimir Fedoseyev, about which I've read good things. The same performances have also been released by X5 and might be cheaper to get that way.
see here
This actually seems like kind of a big deal to me, for all the imperfections of what they had.
edit - I can't get beyond the home page at the moment, other than the message board that has stayed exactly the same. That is the one aspect that needed a lot of updating!!
Can systematic multi-platform testing be far behind? We can only hope...
Pages took way longer to load, and the first time I hit Browse I got the Oops page again. Outstanding.
Best touch - your available credit is up in the right corner in tiny freaking characters. Way to go.
And I can't even see ANY albums under genres anymore. Tried on Chrome and Safari.
GAH.
In other words, the developers just did what they wanted, ignored whatever limited user feedback they got (if any), and that was that. If they want to stay in business much longer, they'll write this "redesign" off as a total loss and stick with what they had, not that that was all that great either. But whoever's driving this bus is clearly in it to please himself, or herself, and us customers can basically go screw themselves.
Craig
Just tried the free daily DL, it's working fine...
Seriously though... Jesus. Every change they make is a significant step further away from common sense, especially for someone who downloads classical.
So now we have to use a little scroll bar to see all the tracks if there's more than about 12, and we can't see the full track title if it's "too long", and we have to mouse over a little i symbol to get things like composer and performer information.
How stupid do they want this site to be? As an example, I clicked on the artist name Michael Chance (an English countertenor) and eventually I'm greeted by a mostly black space perhaps where a picture or a biography might be, though the only information I get is "Years active: s". Plus on the side I get some YouTube videos. Almost as an afterthought, down at the bottom of the screen there's the word "Albums", with some other information completely obscured by the useless fucking player. I have to scroll down to find any albums.
So, blank space + Youtube videos > music. Got it.
I realize that these wrong video suggestions were there before, but they were buried down the page. They actually have a very nicely curated YouTube channel now, which you can reach by clicking the link.