Lost in music
Stuck in horrendous traffic in London, I switched on ClassicFM thinking it would be soothing. It was, and after a while there was rather nice piece, which I thought I would want to listen to again. Of course I didn’t quite catch the name of it at the end, the presenter having rushed it somewhat. So I looked at the time and made a note to go to the website later to find out from their playlist (I assumed there would be a play list).
Two days later, I remembered and went look it up. On the website, as expected, there is a neat feature on the home page called Playlist search – “What was that track”. I picked the day and the time, and though there was nothing like what I was expecting (oboe or cor anglais piece) at the exact time I was listening to it, there was one slightly earlier (a violin and oboe concerto by Bach) that would fit the bill – if this was accurate. Since the time stated was not quite right, it did make me wonder how accurate these were (I suspect they are prepared ahead of actual air time and therefore be slightly off.) At that point I did not have time to follow up but secure in the knowledge the information was there, I thought I would go back to it the next day to order it from amazon or buy it on iTunes if it was available there…
The next day, I went back to the classicfm.com web site, went back to my search and…oh dear: “Unfortunately no playlist information is available for the selected time”
What’s wrong with this? Well, to start with if there had been some indication that the list I saw yesterday was not archived and was going to disappear, I would have written down the reference then and there. Also, the way this is worded implies there never was a list in the first place (otherwise it should say “is no longer available, surely?) This also creates cognitive dissonance: I think I saw, in fact I know I saw a playlist here yesterday but this makes it sound as though there never was one. Exploring further, it turns out there are at this moment in time (Tuesday 7th December, afternoon) no playlists at all on the site even for today – they all present the same sentence above…
Who’s in charge? Surely if there was a technical issue there should be an intelligible error message for users?