Alternate location of quad discography site

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Wow, I had forgotten about this site. Thanks so much for the resurrection. I can sleep better at night.
 
Mark,
i suppose you have a offline copy of the site; if you don't, better use the wayback to make a offline copy and then place it somewhere else.
 
Here I am thinking "oh no, the site is gone" (the discography) and I always use Wayback Machine for stuff. Didn't think to put 2 and 2 (which in a way, leads to 4 {channel}) together and now I know.
 
Thanks to J. D. for the link.

As per many different requests for the info I've created a "Mark Anderson Quadraphonic Discography" page at Quadraphonic.info. For the time being it's mainly the links provided by J. D. to the old site through the "WayBack Machine." I tried to create a PDF of the site, finding all of the pages except one, but so far have not been happy with the results. Anyway, it's still being worked on. The site could be posted at the link below or else where, but whatever is decided a whole lot of web links will need to be changed to make the old site work again.

http://www.quadraphonic.info/Mark-Anderson-Quadraphonic-Discography/
 
(y):)(y)

The main work left to do is re-linking all the sampler track listings to the posts on this board (eek!)

J. D.

Yes, eek! :yikes

I noticed some of the "Hardware" pages either never worked or wayback never archived them as well as some if not most of the images for them. But a lot of the site is still there and what is not will have to be figured out and worked on.
 
At the risk of getting "Carpal tunnel syndrome" after changing about 400 to 500 links/pages the "Mark Anderson Quadraphonic Discography" is back up and working. The "Hardware" section is disabled for now as I was only able to back-up 4 pages from the old site and Not all their images. Either it wasn't backed up or those pages never existed. "The Surround Sound Discography" pages links are still being worked on, so one may get re-directed here or there until all links are updated. Mark can update and change the pages and do whatever as what is needed or wanted. We just got too many requests at QQ for the site and something needed to be done for now. Thanks.
 
Thanks so much for all the support and encouragement from folks here and more so to "Old Quad Guy" for helping with setting up a new site for the discography. I am currently working on the quad discography and should have it completed in the next week or two. The other discography's will follow after. The site can be found at www.surrounddiscography.com.

Thanks again to OQG and John for support.
 
Thanks Mark for your hard work, OQG and John, too. It's an invaluable reference!

Thanks so much for all the support and encouragement from folks here and more so to "Old Quad Guy" for helping with setting up a new site for the discography. I am currently working on the quad discography and should have it completed in the next week or two. The other discography's will follow after. The site can be found at www.surrounddiscography.com.

Thanks again to OQG and John for support.
 
Thanks so much for all the support and encouragement from folks here and more so to "Old Quad Guy" for helping with setting up a new site for the discography. I am currently working on the quad discography and should have it completed in the next week or two. The other discography's will follow after. The site can be found at www.surrounddiscography.com.

Thanks again to OQG and John for support.

Glad to see that the discography will live on.

On the list of Multichannel SACDs, you might talk with the guy in Australia who runs www.sa-cd.net
He has an up to the minute list of all SACDs released (7,716) and probably has a way to show only the Multichannel titles that you could link to.
 
Incidentally, and not sure if this matters or not, but when perusing the version that's on archive.org I was noticing a fairly substantial amount of various names misspelled or somewhat erroneous information, and this on either artist, album or label names.

This can affect searches, where accuracy may be important. (Examples: Bee Gee's as opposed to Bee Gees; Kuda Records when it's Kudu, that sort of thing...)

Are you guys interested in having all of those checked, cleared up and brought to standards? (like peer review sort of thing)

Please don't get it wrong: what I am writing below is merely just a suggestion

Beyond this, and strictly from a professional standpoint, it feels to me as if all of this information is begging to be entered into a proper relational database so that it can easily be displayed in many ways. Flat files are OK, but obviously make editing and everything so incredibly time-consuming later down the line. Having a template format designed, with proper thinking of the schema, data types, unique indexing and relations can ensure that this information will be future-proof. Once this is done, the display (rendering) can be changed at will without ever having to redo anything, and will allow for a lot of extra features to become a reality, like moderated user comments, polling and the likes.

A good example of the type of features would be: Searching by artist, and having the results returned order by format, or by release (with each format as a sub-field), or by label, or searching by format even, and each of those results would have a page of its own where additional info can be entered, graphics, comments and the likes.

It would initially mean a substantial donation of coding time from a specialist in that field, but in my opinion will ultimately be necessary in order to later free the maintainer(s) from otherwise doing redundant and tedious manual work and focus on adding more content to the site instead; as well, to basically ensure that this information survives and evolves as the display will now be completely separated from the way its data itself is being stored. These sort of sites used to cost a fair amount to build, but are so commonplace nowadays that any web coding wizard can take existing templates and easily modify them to fit the project, using a free, open-source content management system such as Drupal or Joomla.

(whether it's someone building a site of cooking recipes and ordering them by type of recipe, author, year, and ingredients or someone listing auto parts for specific models of cars, type of use, and the years of their make the problem is exactly the same viewed from the eyes of a database designer: Break down the data into simple fields and define the relations that govern them so that in turn that data can be displayed in countless ways depending on what the users desire)

In this case, the primary data types would be:

• artist field
• album field
• song field (note: Discogs doesn't have a song field, only album)
• version field (note: Discogs doesn't have a version field)
• physical format field
• release type field
• catalog number field
• label field
• year field
• musical genre field
• album comment field
• album graphic field
• artist graphic field
• label graphic field
• external link field
• artist website link field
• review link field
• popularity field (number of views)
• user rating field (registered users only)
• gateway to online store field (joining affiliate program could make the site easy commission money to defray hosting expenses)

From the start, such a site would provide its users with a variety of display formats, which could mirror the way it is now, as well as ways to arrange it by artist, by year, by format, by label, and immediately view all relevant content with automatically embedded hyperlinks in those multiple display modes. Anyone could view 'what's the most popular album in a certain category' or those types of more rewarding searches where suddenly all of this information can be leveraged and aggregated.

Later, sites designed in this way can have plug-ins that allow users to automatically 'Like' a particular page on social networks, or mention it on Reddit, Twitter, etc... which would help generate traffic and visibility, as well as become optimized for SEO (search engine optimization) which guarantees better results and more traffic from Google searches.
 
The discography is complete and is located at www.surrounddiscography.com. everything should be working as before. The links on the sampler discography seem to be working. If you find any errors, please let me know. Thanks to "old quad guy" for his assistance and generosity for providing the web space.

Thanks Brian for the tip on the SACD discography, I will look into it.

And thanks "staygroovy" for the suggestion. I have always hoped for some assistance. The discographies started as an easy way to print a book to take while music shopping and works well while in that context. As the web has changed in almost 20 years since the web page started your suggestion is certainly appropriate. It would require someone else with the skills to create the database and knowledge and a commitment to follow through many years after it is uploaded to keep it current as the discography is updated.
 
As the web has changed in almost 20 years since the web page started your suggestion is certainly appropriate. It would require someone else with the skills to create the database and knowledge and a commitment to follow through many years after it is uploaded to keep it current as the discography is updated.

Greetings Mark, just to tell you: these modern CMS* systems all have a very friendly front-end management interface so that anyone with admin credentials can use it to enter new content once everything is created. Once it's built all of the information can be entered by just about anyone with minimal training. Installing the software on a web site is not too challenging either. The more difficult part is finding someone who can build the database schema, the person who needs to de-compose the situation and express it into tables, relations and dependencies.Once that crucial step is done, then a front-end system of templates will need to be built to return and display search results for the information.... (like this one)

Think of such a site as always showing search results, in the default case of entering the front page of a category it would probably display "All in this category, ordered by date, newest first". The trick is to give the users ways to display and re-arrange parts of the same data but in different ways according to their needs. Like "most popular record from 1974" or "artist with a name that ends with "uccini", or "Songs with a QR release".

Once the data is in this format, it is fairly simple to add features (like different ways to display it), archive it, migrate it to other systems even, and so on.

If you think of it, this very site here is exactly like what I am describing, except that it's a customized solution called vBulletin targeted to message boards for online communities. The problem of a discography has probably been solved hundreds of times by web developers out there, so I am sure that it would not be much expense to customize such an existing solution to suit your needs. The only hitch is security. There seems to be the constant need to stay current to prevent any such site from being hacked, and sadly this depends a bit on the way the code is written, and as new vulnerabilities become known, would need to get updated every so often.

* CMS: Content Management Systems
 
Mark/staygroovy/et al:

I started working on my own project to create a true relational database out of Mark's discography a year or two ago. The basic work of parsing his work into tables is complete; the major work since then has been trying to get pics of as many items as possible. (God bless eBay!) I've also been collecting a lot of data on foreign releases, from the UK, Japan, Germany, Australia, even Peru and Yugoslavia! Out of deference to Mark, I have made no attempt to actually put this up on the web, partly because I'm not honestly sure of the best way to do so! But I'm happy to share my efforts with the Quad community and work on comments/suggestions.
 
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