CDLink: Music Essays

[Extremus@aol.com]

Some of you may already know about CDLink.  This is a registry site which
links you to individuals' pages where there are essays, reviews, and similar
documents on a particular album.  The cool thing about it is that the article
provides mini-programs which, when you click on an internal link, tell your
CD-ROM to play a song or part of a song to illustrate the point being
discussed.  Some "articles" are more collections of photos, graphics, etc. to
which the music is related.  

To use CDLink, you need web access (the faster, the better), a CD-ROM player,
sound card, speakers, and the audio CD to hear the music.  CDLink lets you
choose the release (if there's more than one) so the music links will work
with your version.  For example, Pink Floyd's "Darkside of the Moon" lists
the original Capitol release, the "Pulse" version, the Mobile Fidelity
version, etc.

Currently, there is only one Who item--an extensive discussion of
Quadrophenia.

The URL is http://www.voyager.com/cdlink/cdlink.html

Voyager provides the software (free) to write your own article or whatever,
including the music links.  You then submit it to the registry to be listed.
 (The details are on the main link page.)  The software language looks fairly
simple.  If you can write html text, you should be able to write using the
link language.  It's best if you use a single CD reference or keep all the
references to a particular disk together to avoid having to shuffle discs in
and out frequently.

I'd like to see some of our Who experts do some entries for CDLink.  Not only
would you have a chance to show off your knowledge, but newer fans would get
some good background on the albums and artists.  For example:  Lauren's
analysis of Coolwalkingetc. would adapt well to a CDLink article.

Even if you're not much of a writer, you could put together a collection of
graphics which represent the music (how about all the different album covers
and artwork used for "Tommy" over the years?)

I know there are a lot of new fans who don't know anything about the older
albums (pre-PsychoD, in many cases) --collectively, this list knows
everything about everything.
We could reach a much broader audience with CDLink.  Imagine making enough
new Who fans to put Pete's next (whatever it is) on the charts!!

Mick Noland