SwingDJs

http://www.cdnow.com

Apparently Amazon bought/merged with CDnow. I am incredibly bummed, the Amazon search interface sucks in comparison to the old CDnow one. It seems that they eliminated a ton of stock and song samples, too.

On a side note, it seems that AMG is now associated with Barnes & Noble.

Swifty wrote:http://www.cdnow.com

Apparently Amazon bought/merged with CDnow. I am incredibly bummed, the Amazon search interface sucks in comparison to the old CDnow one. It seems that they eliminated a ton of stock and song samples, too.

You can still see the old interface at http://cdnowpbc.com/.

I was freaked out because I'd ordered somethings on CDNow that were backordered and they were no where to be found in an Amazon account. They pointed me to that site.

Gary

That's a bummer, CDNow always seemed to have more songs samples than just the first five that Amazon typically has, and they used Media Player instead.

But how can you prefer CD Now's Search interface? CD Now was explicitly by either Artist or Album, not a combined search, so it always took me a while to find something. Amazon.com I can type "Krall Paris" and get right to the right CD.

I absolutely hate the fact that when searching, Amazon lists only 10 CDs at a time, and that they don't show if an album's page has song samples. Plus, they only have samples of 5 songs per album, and 75% of the time the song samples don't work.

Additionally, CDnow just gave me a simple list of search results. I didn't have to deal with "Featured Areas," "Listmania!," "Favorite Magazines!," and other useless crap clogging up both sides of the screen. I also hate the "Great Buy" combo scam they shove on top of the song listing. The whole thing is a cluttered mess.

I'd like to know if any of the big, reliable on-line CD sources allow you to search for SONG TITLE and ARTIST at the same time. Is there a way to do that at Amazon?

I doubt it. I know the problem, when you get 200 responses to your query on Amazon.com.

What I do is find the song on AMG, complete with all the occurrences, then I search the page for the artist using Find option on Windows explorer.

I rarely buy from half.com anymore, but their bare-bones search searches both artist and album title at the same time. Since they deal in used items, they list both in and out of print recordings.

My usual mode is to search on allmusic.com first and everywhere else next, e.g. cheap-cds, amazon, etc. Cheap-cds has my favorite online sample interface, you can download a playlist of all the track samples at once.

Poking around on the 'net I noticed a web site, grovemusic.com, that looks like a pretty definitive online music reference site. Anyone know more about this one?

I'm pretty bummed! CDNow was my best source for CDs. Amazon killed a really great resource by replacing the CDNow site with their own. I'm going to remove the link on my web site to CDNow.

What other sites have others here had good experiences with? Aside from the wev, all that I have to work with locally are a couple of mom and pop CD stores and Borders Bookstore - none of which could get me a lot of the CDs that I have bought from CDNow.

Spin Doctor wrote:What other sites have others here had good experiences with?

I've actually had pretty good luck buying used cds from http://www.djangos.com

Although I used CDNow to listen to a lot of music and save stuff in "my wish list", I don't think I ever bought a CD there.

Although I'll buy anywhere for used stuff, I'd much rather support my local jazz store for new purchases.

If anyone is ever in Philly, you gotta check out "Sound of jazz". They don't have any used stuff, but the guy who heads the jazz dept is SO cool. He'll open stuff for me so I can listen to the whole thing. Plus he's been there for 20 years and knows his stuff. Based on what we buy, he was able to extrapolate our tastes or come up with different versions of songs we like. He turned David Jacoby and I on to "The 3 sounds" for instance (and look at what happened to dave!)>

I realize everyone doesn't have a store like this in their town, so I'm not putting down buying off of online CD stores.

Swifty wrote:On a side note, it seems that AMG is now associated with Barnes & Noble.

AMG is still owned by Alliance Entertainment (not Barned and Noble). CDNow never owned All Music, it only licensed its content. It was never an exclusive deal. Personally, I usually get to AMG directly by going to www.allmusic.com.

Nathan

I was just noting that AMG has links to albums on bn.com now rather than cdnow.com . I'm aware that it was and remains its own entity.