I'm trying to find an index of BBC Music Magazine, in particular the cover cds.

March 4, 2008 9:38 AM

I'm trying to find an index of BBC Music Magazine, in particular the cover cds. I'm collecting them.

There is a back issues page at their website [link] but info about the cds only begins in 2005. Any ideas?

posted by feelinglistless to Media & Arts (7 answers total)

Best answer: You may be setting yourself up as the only authority on this topic, and if you're going to collect all of them you may have to create the index yourself. I'd expect the most extensive list to be on discogs, but there are only a few there right now.
posted by rhizome at 9:48 AM on March 4, 2008

Best answer: You could try setting up an eBay Favourite Search for the CD's and compiling a list yourself as the earlier ones appear.
posted by fire&wings at 10:34 AM on March 4, 2008

Best answer: Hmm. www.abebooks.co.uk might be a place where you can track down some magazines for sale.

If it was me I'd try typing identifying strings (ISBNs, ISSNs, catalogue numbers) into Google to see if I get any hits for partial lists.

From the inlays in the main site, the form seems to be ""BBC MM[0-9]{1,3}"... that gives us hits like BBC MM55, BBC MM88 and BBC MM250. Tedious, but probably the best you'll get.
posted by Leon at 11:09 AM on March 4, 2008

Best answer: Ooh, another thought. Freedb. A search fof BBC Music Magazine gets me 17 hits. We're still compiling from partial sources, though.

You could try the same search on last.fm and drop notes in the top listeners' shoutboxes, asking of they can help. You never know.
posted by Leon at 11:18 AM on March 4, 2008

I have dozens of these from about 2001-4. I think my subscription stopped about the time they started loading a lot of sample tracks and extra material on the back of the performances.

I just had a look. Volumes 7-11. As Leon notes, they seem to use a code for disk number: BBC MM210, BBC MM217 etc. These seem sequential - not related to the volume numbers. At least in that time period. Some others don't (eg, Proms Classics, BBC PRCD99).

The CDDB seems to know most / all of them, although I guess you have to have the disk to trigger the DB.

Charity shops and used CD shops seem to concentrate these.
posted by sagwalla at 3:04 PM on March 17, 2008 [1 favorite]

sagwalla: if you've done cddb lookups on those discs, and your player is set to cache lookups to a local DB, you could probably find and email your local database to feelinglistless. I seem to recall the ones I've used stored the results as plain text.
posted by Leon at 4:05 PM on March 17, 2008

Response by poster: Gosh I thought I'd already done this. Here's a self link by way of an update!

But thanks for your extra help sagwalla and Leon.
posted by feelinglistless at 3:07 PM on April 23, 2008