Cream of the Crop 11/Cream of the Crop 11-1.iso/sound/golden1.zip/GOLDIES.DOC

Text File | 1996-01-18 | 22KB | 413 lines

WHAT IS GOLDEN OLDIES?

Put simply, it's a database program for music lovers, music
collectors and even those fortunate souls who earn their living
by their association with music.  Yet, as many computer users
know, music cataloging and inventory databases are commonplace
in many permutations throughout the realm of cyberspace and can
also be bought off the shelves at local software outlets.  So
what, you may ask, makes Golden Oldies special by comparison to
other offerings of this genre?  The most important answer to
that question in this era of wage stagnation is that it is
absolutely FREE!  You get the product of the labor of others at
no cost to you or your conscience with absolutely no strings
attached.  What a deal!

Okay, okay!  I know that right about now, you're thinking of
deleting this entire package from your hard drive.  After all,
didn't your Mom and Dad always tell you that you get what you
pay for?  So, you're undoubtedly asking yourself "Just how good
can something I get for free actually be?" Well, if you'll
restrain your deleting instincts for just a few sentences
longer, you'll come to realize that "Yes Virginia, there IS a
Santa Claus!"

In actuality, you essentially received two labors of love when
you downloaded this package.  You got my years of love and
devotion to what I call the Baby Boomer era of music.  You also
received the tireless patience and professional expertise of a
database program developer who offered his unsolicited and
uncompensated assistance in making my efforts easily useable by
even the most inexperienced computer user.  This combination is
what sets Golden Oldies apart from the other music database
programs in circulation.

Unlike other music database programs, with Golden Oldies, you
don't start out your trip down the memory lane of music with an
empty tank of gas!  The program comes complete with 2500+ song
titles already loaded.  More importantly, about 90% of all of
the song titles were national top forty hits between the years
1954 and 1979.  While it does not contain every top forty hit
from that period, it will definitely greatly reduce the amount
of effort most lovers and/or collectors of the music of that era
will have to devote to customizing this database to reflect
their own collections and interests.  The remaining 10% of the
titles in this database were also top forty hits, but they are
songs which became popular from 1980 to the present.  There are
also a few movie soundtrack song titles and a couple of Chicago
area garage band releases that most people won't recognize, but
these entries constitute only a minuscule part of the database.
The thing to keep in mind is that this database was never
intended to be a comprehensive music listing.  It is merely what
constitutes my personal music collection.

WHY USE A MUSIC DATABASE?

I assume that most people who will download this database will
be serious music lovers.  Granting the validity of that
assumption, you probably have a fairly large collection of music
in various forms.  That makes keeping track of what you have in
your collection a difficult chore.  It also makes it difficult
to analyze your investment in your collection for things as
mundane as insurance claims (God forbid!).  However, putting
your collection into a database can render much more pleasant
results than you might imagine.  For example, I like to create
genre-specific tapes to listen to that reflect my mood at any
given time.  With a personal music database, creating such tapes
can be made a whole lot easier.  You will notice that this
database contains a field titled "CATEGORY" where I label each
song as being either soft-rock, rock, love, soul, soul love,
soundtrack, novelty or just plain oldie.  Because of this field,
one can simply print out a category- specific listing of all the
songs in the database that match the genre you select.  It then
becomes easy to create tapes of love songs, soul or any other
genre you wish to create.

You can also use the database to generate music shopping lists
to help you concentrate your music buying efforts toward getting
your favorite songs without having to try and remember if you
already have that song in your collection.  By simply entering a
"Y" in the "NEEDED" field of the songs you are missing which
you'd like to add to your collection, you can print out a
customized shopping list to carry with you on your music
collecting sorties.

Depending upon the amount of effort you want to devote to it,
this music database can become even more powerful and capable of
generating ever more selective lists of your music.  You'll
notice that there are fields where you can enter chart data for
each song such as the date it debuted on the charts, the peak
position it attained on the charts and the annual rank the song
holds in comparison to other songs that charted in the same
year.  If you have, or are willing to obtain the resources that
will allow you to fill in these fields, you can then use Golden
Oldies to print out lists of songs in chronological order.
Imagine how nice it would be to view and/or print a listing of
songs that would allow you to create time-specific tapes for
things like class reunions or anniversaries!  Even professionals
like oldies station DJs could use the database in this manner to
set up station rotations for year-specific special nostalgia
programming.

While you can manipulate the data in Golden Oldies in most ways
a music lover or collector would have a need to, you might want
to do even more selective list generation.  If you have or
develop such a need, bear in mind that the database itself, i.e.
MUSIC.DBF, is a standard Dbase IV database file.  As such, it
can be used with any database program which can import the .dbf
file format or which uses the format directly.  Most any
database program, either shareware or commercial, supports the
.dbf format, so you should have no problem using it with
other programs if you want to.

WHY DOES THIS DATABASE CONTAIN SOME EMPTY FIELDS?

Chart information is copyrighted material.  I got much of the
chart information in my personal version of this database from
Joel Whitburn's "Hot 100," "Top Pop Singles 1955 - 1993," "Pop
Annual 1955 - 1994" and other books he has written.  He, in
turn, gleaned much of his information from Billboard's charts.
While owners of these books are free to use the information in
them for their *personal* use, we cannot duplicate and
distribute that copyrighted information.  I *strongly* recommend
Mr. Whitburn's books to the serious music collector.  The
address of Record Research Inc., where you can order these
books, is included later in this text file.  I'd love to save
you the effort of plugging all those numbers in yourself, but I
can't.  I know of a few people who are presently working on
massive music databases which may soon become available on
CD-ROM, but from what I've heard, they will likely be very
limited in how you'll be able to customize and use the
information in them.  If you're really serious about your
collection I'd recommend using this database as a starting point
and dedicating some serious keyboard time to filling in the
blanks you want to add.  It isn't nearly as hard as you might
imagine if you have the right reference materials to work with.

You'll also probably have to change some of the data included in
this database to make it more correctly reflective of your
personal music taste and/or the way you use music.  The CATEGORY
field, for example, is purely subjective.  Likewise, the media
fields, reflecting the media I have the song on, will likely not
match your own inventory of music.

ABOUT MY DISC COLLECTION

All but a few (less than 10) of the titles were/are available on
CDs.  My CD collection presently totals out at about 750 discs
which consist of roughly 1/3 various artist compilations and 2/3
single-artist albums (most of which are greatest
hits/anthologies).  A couple of the titles are on bootleg CDs
but that is because that's the *only* way I could get them on CD
as there are a few artists and labels who are sitting on music
and refusing to release it.  You can probably find 90% of the
songs in this database on CD at your local music retailer.  You
might not find them on the same disc that I have them on, but
most of this music is readily available either on the same discs
or on newer compilations and reissues with different titles.
The 10% you can't find in the racks of retail shops are likely
available through mail-order outfits.  All of the mail-order
dealers I recommend later in this text are people I've done
business with.  While they may differ slightly in their
efficiency insofar as processing orders go, they all deliver the
goods as promised.

THE HISTORY OF GOLDEN OLDIES

The Golden Oldies database file, MUSIC.DBF, was created by me,
Kevin J.  Osiowy.  The Golden Oldies program files were created
by John Phillips.  I released the database file and a slightly
different version of this doc file in October of 1995.  I had
released two less complete versions of the database file on
Compuserve some months earlier.  In December of 1995, John
Phillips got a copy of my database file and was impressed enough
by my efforts to call my BBS and volunteer to create a program
that would allow anyone with a DOS-based system to make use of
it.  The program went through 5 different stages of test and
development before John arrived at the finished product you now
have.  I cannot adequately express my gratitude to John Phillips
for his effort.  In this day and age, one does not often run
into total strangers who selflessly offer their time and
expertise without any expectation of personal gain.

THE RERECORDED HIT SCAM

I've become something of a reluctant student of the machinations
of the music industry where their CD product is concerned.  I
call myself a reluctant student because the lessons I've learned
have been at the cost of yet another piece of innocence on my
part as well as at a personal cost of dollars and cents.
Perhaps it was naive of me to grow up under the impression that
music was one of the few things in life that one could turn to
for pure enjoyment.  Throughout my pre-CD music consumption
years, obtaining the tunes I had come to know and love was
pretty much as effortless and straightforward as heading to my
local music retailer and picking out the album I was seeking or
dialing a number that appeared on my television screen.  Some
people say I was lucky because I don't recall a single instance
in those days of getting something I didn't pay for.
Unfortunately, with the advent of CD technology, my former
carefree music shopping forays became fraught with pitfalls I
never dreamed I would encounter.  For that reason, I include the
following in the hope that I might help the novice music shopper
avoid some of those pitfalls.

The music industry has to be populated by some of the most
arrogant, narcissistic and unscrupulous people to stride upon
this planet.  Not only do they bask in the cult-like devotion of
millions of music lovers, but they also have the arrogance to
fleece those unwitting lambs for the sake of a couple of bucks
beyond the billions they've already been happily given by music
consumers.  As a baby-boomer who grew up in rock & roll's golden
era, music became an important part of my life.  As a result,
the money I, and millions of others of my generation have passed
along to the recording industry through our purchases of 45's,
albums, 8-track tapes, cassettes and now, CDs, has enriched the
industry by untold billions of dollars.  We baby-boomers
literally transformed garage bands and basement recording
studios into the mega-stars and giant recording houses of today.
To borrow and paraphrase a passage from a well-known tune, "We
built [that] city on rock and roll!" Given the aforementioned,
you would think that the industry would feel some obligation
towards us baby-boomers and strive to deal with us honestly and
ethically.  Yet, anyone with more than 50 CDs in their music
collection has likely been victimized by the music industry's
sleight-of-hand.

The music industry gets away with unscrupulous practices which
would land people in other businesses squarely behind bars.  I
have no idea why this is, I only know that it is absolutely
true.  Some years back, I worked in the employment agency
business where you could lose your license and face heavy fines
for a tactic known as "bait-and-switch." That's the practice of
advertising a great job that's extremely difficult to get and
then steering applicants to other less attractive but more
easily filled positions.  The recording industry gets away with
an identical scam all the time.  Labels and artists regularly
sell rerecorded versions of well-known hits without any hint on
the packaging that they are doing so. In some cases, the artists
are out for a quick buck so they create a completely new version
of one of their hits so they can sell it to a label other than
the one they originally recorded the hit for.  In other
instances, a label will sell what amount to what the motion
picture industry calls out-takes in that they sell the studio
session tapes of hits which were not selected as the final
single version they released, to smaller independent labels.  In
still other cases, an artist will rerecord hits he or she had on
another label and combine them with hits from their present
label to create the illusion that they are selling all their
major hits in one package.  Anyone who has ever bought a
substantial number of compact discs featuring hits from the
'50s, '60s or '70s has very likely been burned by one
permutation or another of this scam.

In some cases, it's absolutely impossible to keep from falling
prey to such scams.  For example, if you purchase Neil Diamond's
"The Greatest Hits 1966 - 1992," don't count on seeing the word
"live" anywhere on the outside packaging.  Yet, once you get the
CD home and anxiously insert the discs while looking forward to
hearing those old musical memories, instead of the old standards
you grew up with and loved, you'll find yourself listening to a
reggae version of "Red Red Wine" and an audience participation
version of "Sweet Caroline." You'll wince as Diamond down-tempos
and pseudo-raps "Morningside" as you strain to hear the
instruments through the audience noise.  You won't understand
why you got this "bait-and-switch" deal unless you open up the
booklet that accompanies the CD set and are treated to Diamond's
explanation that he replaced the original versions of half the
songs in the set with the live versions because, in *his*
opinion, some songs lend themselves better to live performances
than others.  Never mind that if his fans wanted reggae they
would be Bob Marley fans.... *not* Neil Diamond fans.  Never
mind that Mr. Diamond *couldn't* have included the hit versions
of the live songs he substitutes because he recorded them on
another label that retains the rights to them.  Since Columbia
released this ripoff, even placing your trust in a major label
is no guarantee that you won't get burned.

A few other examples of the music industry's scams are;

"26 ORIGINAL TRACKS BY THE ORIGINAL ARTISTS" is the come-on
utilized on the cover of "70 Ounces Of GOLD" released by Compose
CDs & Cassettes.  In this case, the folks at Compose are telling
the absolute truth.  What they *don't* tell you is that many of
the cuts on the CD are studio versions of the songs that are
nothing like the hit versions that we listened to as they
climbed the charts!  This CD probably sold like hotcakes because
it featured hits like "Soul Man," "When A Man Loves A Woman,"
"Lightnin' Strikes" and "Wipe Out." Yet each of these top ten
hits on the CD were anemic renditions of the chartbusters we
remember with the single exception an outstanding stereo version
"Then He Kissed Me" by the Crystals.  Unfortunately, most people
who buy this CD are not looking to add a single song to their
collection.

A double whammy! "Rock 'n' Roll Fever of the 60's" and "Rock 'n'
Roll Fever of the 70's" released by LOMI.  Not a single hit
version to be found in these previously unreleased studio
rejects.  If you want to hear Christie screw up "Yellow River"
or a muted version of "Little Children" by Billy J. Kramer,
these lemons are for you!

What happens when you put a generation-Xer who cares nothing
about the music of the baby-boomer era behind the mixing
console?  Answer.  "The Rare Breed - The Super K Collection" on
the Collectibles label.  The remix of the one and only hit song
the Rare Breed ever had, namely "Beg, Borrow and Steal" so badly
muted the instruments that the group might as well have done the
song acappella.

For 9 years, I have been waiting and regularly checking with my
CD vendors for Paul Davis to release a CD of his greatest hits.
Finally, just recently, I discovered he had done so and I
promptly ordered one for my collection.  What I got was what
should have been titled "Half of Paul Davis' Greatest Hits."
Neither "Cool Night" nor "65 Love Affair" are on this new disc.
This is another case where an artist switched labels in the
midst of his popularity and could only include his early hits on
the CD he released.  So why not call the CD something like "His
Early Hits" or "The Bang Years" as other artists have done when
they've had hits on different labels?  At least that would alert
novice buyers that they were getting a less than complete
collection of the artist's hits.  Apparently, the industry and
artists so renowned for their self-aggrandizing charity
love-fests feel no guilt whatsoever about ripping off music
lovers with scams like this.

Remember the Sir Douglas Quintet?  Their two claims to fame were
"She's About A Mover" and "Mendicino." This time, Rhino is the
culprit to blame for putting a heretofore unheard version of
"She's About A Mover" on their "Texas Music Vol.  3." I don't
know about other music enthusiasts, but speaking for myself, I
firmly believe that if a record label can't come up with the hit
version of an old song, it should not try to pass off a studio
reject or live version on to consumers unless they clearly state
on the outside of the CD package that this is what they are
doing.  In the case of "Texas Music Vol.3" I didn't recognize
any other song listed except "She's About A Mover" and "Ju Ju
Hand" by Sam the Sham and The Pharaohs.  I doubt if anything
else on that CD charted nationally, so it is likely that those
two songs are the major selling draws for the disc.  This makes
it all the more incredible that the original version that
charted wasn't what was actually on the disc.

Why have I droned on for so long about this particular subject?
It is simply because I'm by no means a wealthy man.  I schlep
packages for a living, live in a blue-collar neighborhood and
drive a 12 year old car.  However, where music is concerned, I
have a collection and equipment to play it on that most people
with incomes twice or three times mine don't have.  It is one of
the few grand passions of my life.  I have been a voracious
consumer of music since my prepubescent years.  It would be
impossible to calculate the amount of money I've poured into the
coffers of the music industry throughout my 44 years on this
speck of dust.  In return for my lifetime of investment, I
foolishly expect some sort of loyalty from the industry toward
those of us they owe so much to.  When I instead get the back of
the industry's hand, I become enraged.  Thus this venting of my
spleen.

My parting advice to novice music collectors is to beware of the
labels on the CDs they buy.  Even though you can't always rely
on the major labels to deal with you honestly, buying a CD made
by a label you've never heard of is definitely a crap shoot with
the odds stacked against you.  Many mail-order houses such as
those I list at the end of this file have knowledgeable phone
salespeople who can tell you whether or not a particular CD is
what you're looking for.  Some, like DisCollector, don't even
carry rerecorded material so they're very safe bets.

IF YOU NEED HELP.....

I'm always happy to lend a hand to fellow music lovers in their
quest to find their favorite musical memories on disc.  I've
been very lucky to encounter many very helpful people who
selflessly gave of their own time and effort to assist me in
getting some of my most treasured music. That's why I am
distributing this database, which represents so many hours of my
time and effort, with no strings attached.  It's my way of
repaying the online community for all the help they've given to
me.  If you would like help in setting up this database for your
own use, finding a tune on CD or even help in finding out the
name of a song that you can only remember a few lines of lyrics
from, you can find me in the American Oldies Diner forum on
CompuServe or you can call my BBS, The Monsoon Hotel, at
312-927-9534.  My handle on my BBS is Vinh Long (from my Vietnam
days).

                                   Happy listening!
                                   Kevin J. Osiowy
                                   CIS ID 70313,2466

TRIED & TRUE MUSIC SOURCES

CDMO - 516-385-2366

DisCollector - imports 303-841-3000

Midnight Records - imports - boots 212-675-2768

Metro Music - 301-622-2473

Thoughtscape Sounds - imports - soundtracks 800-435-6185

Footlight Records - soundtracks 212-533-1572

Remember When - 708-963-1957

Chicago Digital - 708-383-1870

To order the Joel Whitburn books; Record Research Inc.
414-251-5408