THE GRAMMY AWARDS A review by Peter Sandor Gardos CompuServe 70214,2013 Copyright RIPC (c) 1993 Resource International Publishing Company Route 1, Box 168 Milford, TX 76670 System Requirements: IBM AT or better or 100% compatible, 640K RAM, DOS 3.0 or greater, Hard disk with 3MB free space, CD-ROM drive, Microsoft CD Extensions (MSCDEX) 2.1 or later, Mouse Super VGA card and monitor, 1 MB RAM recommended The Grammy Awards is another in a long line of informational/educational CD-ROMs by Compton's. Compton's was at the forefront of the home CD-ROM market - years ago producing one of the finest CD-ROM encyclopedias. Oddly enough, despite all the years of experience, and all of the different search engines they have tried, Compton's somehow always seems to miss the mark with their programs' front ends. Sadly, such is still the case, as can be witnessed by looking at The Grammy Awards. Unfortunately, this program turns out to be another in a long line of good ideas for CDs that are poorly executed. The Grammy Awards is a thirty-four year retrospective, spanning the years from 1958 to 1992. Included are hundreds of pictures, and what is claimed to be over 50 minutes of audio clips. All told, there is award information provided on over 6,000 Grammy Award nominees and winners. Once you complete the straightforward and brief installation, you simply change to the correct directory and type, "GRAMMY" to start the program. After viewing an enjoyable animated intro in stereo the main screen appears. Thankfully, since it takes up so much time and storage space, this intro can be bypassed or even deleted from the hard drive. There is however no way to get past the initial credit screen (which lasts several seconds longer than most will desire after you get over the novelty of the cute stereo effect). Also thankfully, unlike many of the other Compton's installation programs, this one does not change your config.sys file without permission. Instead it displays the suggested changes and then displays an error message, thus ending the installation program. Although the installation is in fact complete, the message you are given is that the installation has aborted. How a bug this obvious, though not serious, was left uncorrected is beyond me, but is typical of many of Compton's products. It is possible at this point to interact with the program in one of three ways. By far the most enjoyable way to use the program is to, at this point, push the button labeled "Shows" and then pick a year from those displayed. You are then taken to a sort of tour of the Grammy Awards for that year. Here is where the new interface developed presumably by UniDisc really shines. Each year and each award is presented in subtly different ways. Although many of these things are minor, it is a nice touch. For example, although the backdrops all have a gramophone motif, there seem to be dozens of actual wallpapers. In addition, how exactly the nominees are presented, and how the pictures come into view change from award to award. Overall, given how unchanging most of these shows and awards are, and also keeping in mind the fairly limited visuals and audio, this serves to keep things reasonable interesting. Some of the effects are actually quite amusing. For example, in 1964, the Beatles were presented with the award for "Best New Artist" by Peter Sellers. While you listen to the presentation, each of Sellers' mistakes is put into quotes, such as his referring to the Grammy as the "Grandma award." While viewing in this way it is possible to advance more quickly forward or back by pressing the Previous or Next buttons to jump to the next award. Unfortunately, once something is displayed, such as the list of nominees, there is no way to advance to the next screen, except by going on to the next topic. Unfortunately, a great deal is left out, especially for earlier years (no pictures or sound are included at all for the years 1958-1961 or 1963). In many cases after one or two awards, the viewer is treated to the "Parade of Winners;" a run through of the names of some of the big award recipients. Indeed, although Compton's claims to include 50 minutes of audio, the majority of the time is spent listening to some sort of theme music while names and awards flash by. In addition, all of the clips are of the nominees names being read, not actual clips of music. While this is surely because of legal constraints, it makes the appeal of the program extremely limited. So often, I would see the title of a song that I wasn't sure I knew; if it had been possible to click on the title and hear even a few seconds, it would have made this a much better program. As it stands, there is little here besides an attractive way of presenting lists of nominees and winners. This is what really turns out to be the fatal flaw of this CD. What is the point of a multimedia, interactive CD about music, that has no real music clips? Had it not been for this omission, this would have been a fine product, despite the other minor nuisances. The other main way of viewing the information contained on this CD is by pressing the button labeled: "The Grammys." This gives you a list of categories, such as "Best Artist" and "Best Recording." From here you make increasingly specific selections until you wind up at a screen labeled "Suite of Nominees" from where you can select a specific award. For example, you can begin by clicking on "By Category" which takes you to a listing of all possible award categories; from there, you can select "Album of the Year" which will display a list of all years this award was given. Once you select a year, you are taken to a screen that displays all of the nominees for that year, with the winner shown in gold letters. If a camera is displayed next to any of the nominees that means there is a picture available, if a pair of headphones is shown that means that an audio clip is accessible. Unfortunately, this is where much of the klutziness of this interface becomes apparent. Clicking on one of these multimedia icons takes you to another screen which simply lists in (ever so slightly) greater detail who the award nominee you just clicked on is. At this point you need to click again on a button labeled with a camera or headphones which then takes you to the screen where you select which picture or audio clip you wish to see. This occurs even if there is only one selection possible. In addition, there is no way of knowing what the clip is. For example, just because you clicked on the performer's name that was nominated for song of the year in 1987 does not mean that the audio clip you jump to has anything to do with that award; it may be a clip of that performer presenting an award for instance in 1991. Once you realize this fact, you need to laboriously back your way out of each of the selection screens you have gone through to get back to the main selection box. Hardly, a cutting edge search engine. I might also add that the problem with having to back out manually screen by screen is intensified by the fact that Compton's has made a real attempt to create smooth fades and transitions between screens. While visually appealing, this makes searching quickly an impossibility. Indeed, the entire interface needs upgrading. It is quite appealing visually but lacks some basic functionality of even the most basic searching programs. It also lacks a Windows front end, although it will run under Windows and actually looks more "Windows-like" than any other DOS program I have seen lately. It would have been nice if Compton's had included some way of searching for all of the pictures and sound clips directly, much like the "Multimedia Gallery" on other MPC disks. It would also have been nice if instead of having to type in the entire name of, for instance, a musical group when doing a search, if the program began to narrow possibilities down as each letter is typed, the way most search engines and databases do. The final way of using the program is by playing the Trivia game. This part of the program is truly lackluster. It consists entirely of a question being posed with three possible answers. If you pick the incorrect one, you are told what the correct answer is; if you select the right one, you go on to the next question. You begin by selecting the year from which the questions should be posed. After five questions, you are given your score and returned to the main trivia screen. If you pick "General Trivia" instead of a year, the game continues for as long as you like. No pictures or sounds are included, and there is really nothing at all to vary the game besides new questions. A final problem became apparent when I tried to demonstrate the disk to some of my musician friends - none were interested. Apparently, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (the organization that awards the Grammys) is not particularly respected by serious musicians. They are known to favor flash and money over actual talent, and thus many of the truly great works of music of the past were passed over. It actually is instructive to look at the nominees and awards of past years. So often the winner is now all but unknown, while it is amazing to think that one of the given nominations didn't win. Who would have thought that 5th Dimension would win over The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band?! Also, as another friend of mine pointed out, Country as well as many of the less "pop" oriented categories are given short shrift. This is not the fault of the CD per se, but it does limit the inherent interest in the topic at hand. Overall, this could have been a great CD. Had the interface worked more quickly and intuitively, and had music clips been included this would have been the kind of CD you could have used to show off to your friends why you spent $1,000 upgrading your computer system with a CD-ROM player and sound card. As it stands, it will probably have lasting appeal only to real devotees and fans of the Grammy Awards, who will now have a klutzy and slow way of determining who won the Grammy Award in 1987 for best album cover and the like. PRO: A great idea. Will appeal to die-hard music lovers and Grammy Awards fans. CON: Poor interface. Sound clips are very limited. No video clips. Trivia game is dull. SUMMARY: C+ ------------------------------------------------------------------ Published by Comptons's NewMedia, Inc., 2320 Camino Vida Roble Carlsbad, CA 92009 Tel: (800) 532-3766, (619) 929-2626 Produced in association with UniDisc, Inc. Retail price: $69.95 [Testing was performed using a Zenon 486-33 PC with 8MB RAM, a NEC Intersect 84 CD-ROM drive, Tseng ET4000 local bus SVGA card, and a ProAudio Spectrum Plus sound card] Peter Sandor Gardos is a clinical sexologist in Atlanta who has been involved with computers since he got his first TRS-80 (4K) in 1976. He is currently completing his Ph.D. in clinical psychology.