Sunday, June 07, 2015
Bye, Archive
For several years Archive.org served as a good source of old radio shows. It's hugely disorganized because the normal rules of archiving and library work are completely absent. For instance, lots of radio shows begin with The as you'd expect, and a surprising number begin with The Adventures Of. A librarian would see this and list The Shadow as Shadow, The so you could find it alphabetically. Archive.org didn't follow this rule, so almost everything is under T.
Still, you could usually find things by letting Google do the library work. Now that I know the setup, and know what I want, I can always reach the correct listing quickly.
Recently Archive decided to re-organize. Good! Finally some proper alphabetizing, maybe?
Nope. No change at all in the alphabet, or the nonsensical keywords.
What IS changing is the "skin", and the overall arrangement of the page with thumbnails, downloadable files, and playable files. In the earlier setup these were separate. Now you basically can't reach the downloads. There is an icon that claims to be for downloading, but it just leads to playing.
So bye-bye, Archive. No more usability = no more donations from me. I'll go back to buying from OTRCAT, or finding the shows on Youtube. Most uploaders have given up on Archive anyway.
More broadly: Any organization that wants to compete with Google needs to offer something better. What Archive offered previously was an open format that made downloading easy. Locate the MP3 file, right-click. When radio shows are placed on Youtube as 'fake video', you have to use something like Firefox's download helper, which is inconvenient and doesn't always work. Now Archive's downloading is even harder than Youtube.
¶ 1:23 AM 
For several years Archive.org served as a good source of old radio shows. It's hugely disorganized because the normal rules of archiving and library work are completely absent. For instance, lots of radio shows begin with The as you'd expect, and a surprising number begin with The Adventures Of. A librarian would see this and list The Shadow as Shadow, The so you could find it alphabetically. Archive.org didn't follow this rule, so almost everything is under T.
Still, you could usually find things by letting Google do the library work. Now that I know the setup, and know what I want, I can always reach the correct listing quickly.
Recently Archive decided to re-organize. Good! Finally some proper alphabetizing, maybe?
Nope. No change at all in the alphabet, or the nonsensical keywords.
What IS changing is the "skin", and the overall arrangement of the page with thumbnails, downloadable files, and playable files. In the earlier setup these were separate. Now you basically can't reach the downloads. There is an icon that claims to be for downloading, but it just leads to playing.
So bye-bye, Archive. No more usability = no more donations from me. I'll go back to buying from OTRCAT, or finding the shows on Youtube. Most uploaders have given up on Archive anyway.
More broadly: Any organization that wants to compete with Google needs to offer something better. What Archive offered previously was an open format that made downloading easy. Locate the MP3 file, right-click. When radio shows are placed on Youtube as 'fake video', you have to use something like Firefox's download helper, which is inconvenient and doesn't always work. Now Archive's downloading is even harder than Youtube.
¶ 1:23 AM
