Posted 6:00 PM by Gene

People who rip CDs with Windows Media Player soon realize the BUGMEISTER has a friend at Allmusic.com. It may have more mistakes than any other reference work on the Web. There's hardly an album we've ripped whose entry we haven't had to correct, whether it's a composer credit missing a first name or the wrong album art. One special Allmusic trait is with older albums it can't decide on the album date -- is it the year of first release or the year of the current issue's release? A friend of ours we'll call Mr. Squiggle who specializes in show tunes MUST put the name of the show before EVERY song title, thus screwing up the indexing, and his neat little mark of Zorro afterward; and he frequently does something like this:

The Rothchilds [SIC!], musical~Have YouEver [SIC!] Seen A Prettier Little Congress?/Stab [SIC!]

...taking up so much space with his what-a-good-boy-am-I genre listings and squiggle routine he'll forget the last words of a title. Certainly fans of what some idiot called "classic pop" will be familiar with the name of Raymond Egan B. [SIC!] Classical albums? The site should have a spinoff called DoItYourselfAlbumListings.com -- but if you like entries like this:

Symphonie n°1 "Jérémie" - Largamente

...you'll LOVE Allmusic.com. Combined with WMP's quirks (when entering names in the "Contributing Artist" column you don't space after a semi-colon, otherwise BUGMEISTER will add as many spaces as He wants; in Composer, you can) this dread outfit will soon lead you to insanity. Thus did we come across another preposterous quirk today: ripping an album we found this composer credit:

Aynsley Dunbar; Bob Merrill; Gregg Rolie; Jule Styne; Neal Schon

We are ignoramus enough not to know the odd-numbered names but with this prompting we did learn the first has drummed for fifty bands and the third and fifth started eighteen jazz-rock bands and are now enshrined in the Pei Lakeside Mausoleum in Cleveland. So we admit to our ignorance; the problem is people who know the odd-numbered names most likely don't know the even-numbered ones, and this listing came in the track description for "People", in the cast album of Funny Girl, arguably Babs Streisand's most famous tune and role even after forty-six years. Stupid is as stupid does, said Forrest Gump, and though we're still not quite sure what it means with friends like the BUGMEISTER stupid does very well for Allmusic.com.