"Music Collection replaced by a 404 error"

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You have to live with the consequences of your actions. It's embarrassing when you praise something that fail to measure up. I wrote a panegyric blog post a couple of years ago about Music Collection (a configurable Music Management System), read more here (opens in a new window). The most valuable feature was the integration with Discogs (importing album data and tracklists automatically). In the blog post I aggrandized the component, calling it the "Rolls Royce" of data-base music products. However, the Discogs integration only worked for a couple of weeks. The developer JoomlaThat! never bothered to fix the integration. Moreover, the component was expensive, $50. I was caught like a donkey between two stacks of hay. I started to enter albums manually. Artist by artist. Album by album. Song by song including adding the exact running time. Monotonous, boring and time-consuming. Ultimately, I had enough. On October 9th 2022 a 404 error message occurred (page not fund or file not found). Apparently, Music Collection didn't survive an update. That was the end of it. I had to find a new solution. A starting point was to minimize duplication of work. I decided to build the Albums section based on the main source, Discogs. In contrast to Music Collection, Discogs works perfectly. In hindsight, it was stupid to buy a product for music management, when a more advanced system already existed. The links in table in the Artists section link to the Artist page on Discogs. The Albums section is completely rebuilt. For every album there's a link to Discogs. Maybe not the most elaborate or aesthetic solution, but it works. The Discogs API lets developers build their own Discogs-powered applications for the web, desktop, and mobile devices. A future alternative is to ask an API-knowledgeable person to write a script. One thing is for sure. I will never buy a component from JoomlaThat! again. I will also be more careful in the future making precipitate assessments. You live and you learn. At least, in theory.


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