News > Site Changes

Site Changes

Site design by Richard G. Hallas (email Richard@Hallas.net or Webmaster@OCCDs.org).

5th–7th August 2022	Unbelievably, spotted (and corrected) an error in the first paragraph on the opening page! The final sentence began with “If would like”; inserted the missing “you”. Also deleted the “recently” from “recording [recently] won an award”. In the reviews (both on the dedicated page and on the related CD pages), links to the American Record Guide had a common malformation at the end, involving a spurious space and an improper application of italics; corrected all five instances. Added quotations from several previously overlooked reviews from MusicWeb International: CD3/2009 by Paul Serotsky, and CD3/2009, CD5/2009, CD6/2009, CD7/2009, CD8/2009, CD9/2009, CD12/2011 and CD13/2011 by Dave Billinge; and also some nice customer feedback about CD5/2009 and CD15/2016 from Sean O’Neill. Added a link on the Reviews page to Paul Serotsky’s article, An Unsung Hero of Minimalist Miking. On the About page, the three demonstration links headed Links, in the About this site section, caused the view to return to the top of the page if clicked. Now, they’ve been made to link to a label attached to the Links heading just above them. This has no visible effect, but with luck (depending on the browser), it should mean that the demo links now do not react at all if clicked, thus avoiding the previous disconcerting and disruptive scroll back to the top. On the About page, it turned out that the Just Host affiliate link was no longer working, and the advertising graphic was absent. I’ve no idea how long this has been broken; the affiliate scheme must have changed without my realising it. However, the scheme is still active (now that the links have been updated, at least), so the links and graphics should be working again, now. Wrote a comprehensive new 50% off Special Offer page, with lots of review quotations (same as on the Sampler CD page) and a summary table of all fifteen CDs in the offer. Created the new YouTube channel, with fifteen videos made from the sample tracks and a playlist combining them all. Added a short new section near the top of the opening Welcome page announcing the new YouTube channel and also mentioning and linking to the 50% off Special Offer. The Sampler CD page has been updated in several ways: The quoted reviews have been brought up to date so that they now quote all the general comments (those not related to a specific CD) from the Reviews page. There are now references to the new YouTube channel, mentioning that all the Sampler CD tracks have been turned into videos. There’s now an additional bonus track from CD15/2016 to download. The downloadable CD tray PDF has been updated to correct a minor error (discovered while making the YouTube videos): track 10 claimed to be movement II rather than movement IV of Dvořák’s Symphony no 8. New versions of the CD booklet and tray inlay PDFs (labelled CD0/2011v2) replace the earlier versions and now have updated layouts to include details of the fifteenth track, which should still fit on a standard CD. The downloadable archive has been replaced with a new version that includes the new bonus track and amended PDF inlays. In fact, a copy of the previous archive (now called SamplerCDv1.zip) has been retained, but is no longer linked for download, and contains a corrected version of the tray inlay PDF. (To download this archive, copy the URL of the new version and edit ‘v1’ into its filename.) I made an interesting discovery about the PayPal buttons, which led to a correction. For as long as the site has existed, the PayPal buttons have had a 3D appearance. But I noticed that the View Cart and Buy Now buttons (used by the Sampler CD and, now, the Special Offer) had suddenly taken on a new, flat look. All the Add to Cart buttons on the regular CD pages, though, retained their old 3D appearance. Therefore, there was inconsistency, which is undesirable. Investigations revealed that the buttons that had changed to a flat appearance were using a US-based address, whereas the older-style 3D ones used a GB-based address; clearly, PayPal maintains different styles for different regions, and the US style has gone modern and flat. Although this may well happen to the GB buttons in due course, I wanted consistency, primarily; and I quite like the more iconic old 3D style. So, I changed the PayPal buttons with US-based graphics to use the GB graphics instead, so all the PayPal buttons are once again in the same GB style (and are 3D for now, at least).
31st August 2019	Added an SSL certificate: the site is now secure.
4th March 2019	At Geoffrey’s request, reverted the CD price to £10 from £15 and increased the postage prices instead, from £3–£7 to £5–£9.
27th September 2018	As Geoffrey pointed out, the opening page of the site had stagnated, and was still showing a major announcement from 2011, and a new release from 2016, as though they were recent events. As a consequence, and despite the absence of anything new to say, I’ve revamped the presentation of the opening page entirely. Now, the news items that were formerly visible here have been moved off into their own individual pages, linked from a series of headings in a new news summary list. This is much neater, and should there ever be anything new to announce, it will be more prominent in the new scheme, and then can be similarly demoted more easily at a future date. In the interests of historical accuracy I’ve restored the news item about the disastrous flirtation with Kickstarter. Also, we still feature the Huddersfield CD (CD15/2016) as the latest CD for the simple reason that that’s what it is. Maybe I’ll hide the Latest Release section entirely in a year or two. At Geoffrey’s request, due to rising costs and limited sales etc., CD prices have been increased across the board from £10 to £15. I confess to having been rather neglecting my duties. I’ve been so busy this year that I simply haven’t had time to update the site, and consequently several recent reviews had not been quoted. I’ve now added all the missing reviews from 2018. Aside from a few new general comments about OCCDs (see the first part of the Reviews page), there are new MusicWeb reviews for discs 1, 2 (two new reviews each for those two), 3, 4, 10, 14 and 15. Finally, I’ve added new ‘Comments about…’ headings to the Reviews page to clarify the distinction between the general and specific quotation sections.
17th February 2018	MusicWeb International has re-reviewed CD12/2011, and the latest coverage is hugely complimentary about all aspects of the performance, and appreciative of Wanda Wiłkomirska in particular. Review quotations have therefore been added as usual.
22nd November 2017	Supraphon has just announced a new studio recording of Jan Novák’s Philharmonic Dances. This means that our recording is no longer unique, although it remains the first on CD. Thus, our live version is the first commercial recording; Supraphon’s is the first studio recording. The info-box on the CD1/2008 page has thus been updated to remove the old claim that ours was the only commercial recording of this piece, since it’s no longer true! (We used to say, “the first (and currently only) commercial recording”; now we say, “the very first commercial recording”.)
19th October 2017	Rediscovered, and belatedly added to the Reviews page, a final very nice piece of customer feedback from January this year. Hermann Meller, having ordered all of our CDs and been impressed by them, wanted to place a standing order for any/all future releases. If only there were to be any. We have several CDs of recordings we’d still love to put out, but our Kickstarter campaign failed miserably and there seems to be no way forward to release any more. There just aren’t enough true music lovers left in the world, it seems, so Campoli’s farewell concert performance and other fine issues will very probably never see the light of day. Short of a miracle (such as an altruistic music lover with deep pockets), our range is likely to expand no further for the foreseeable future.
21st August 2016	Remarkably, MusicWeb International has now reviewed (with separate reviewers) CD15/2016 a total of three times! All three reviews have nice things to say, so in addition to Jonathan Woolf’s original review we now have further quotations from Stephen Vasta and Rob Barnett.
26th July 2016	Although this should be completely invisible to the outside world, ownership of this site and domains has now been transferred from Geoffrey Terry to Richard Hallas to ensure the label and site’s long-term longevity. It may in future spend a long time not changing at all, but at least it will still be there.
18th June 2016	Added some nice customer comments about CD4/2009 (Amazon review).
9th April 2016	Added Google Translate to all pages of the site, with the pop-up language-selection menu positioned in the header bar, just to the left of the logo at the right-hand end. The translation control is only supposed to appear if the user’s browser is not set to English, but – due to an apparently long-standing bug – the control always appears by default. Happily, I discovered what appears to be a pretty foolproof workaround, so the control does indeed behave as intended; i.e. it should only appear if your browser is set to a language other than English. If you’re viewing the site on an English-language system, the site should look just the same as before (with no new translation menu). Corrected quite a large number of instances where recent browser changes appear to have resulted in greater sensitivity to CSS ‘clear’ commands and hence some minor layout problems. There were three significant issues, all of which have been corrected: 1. many horizontal rule-offs failed to extend right across the full width of the page; 2. some paragraphs failed to observe the right margin and went right to the edge of the window; 3. numerous boxes (especially review boxes on CD pages) became too wide and overflowed off the right edge of the page. All such problems are now fixed once again.
4th March 2016	Added review comments about CD15/2016 (MusicWeb International).
25th January 2016	Added a couple of lovely comments by Bill Abbie (personal correspondence) to the ‘reviews’ of CD15 and CD0 (i.e. general comments about multiple discs), and of course duplicated them on the Reviews page.
6th January 2016	Added some icon refinements for the latest technology: a whole set of touch/bookmark icons for Apple devices and a pinned site icon for Safari 9, and a set of live-tile graphics and related settings for Windows 10, Internet Explorer 11 and Microsoft Edge.
30th/31st December 2015	Incorporated some changes from Geoffrey to the CD15/2016 news announcement. Work complete; launch!
22nd December 2015	Finalised the CD15/2016 page and wrote the news announcement; now ready to upload as soon as Geoffrey provides the PayPal code and says he’s ready to go ahead.
20th December 2015	Added CD15/2016 to the catalogue. This includes full indexing, of course, and graphical resources on the Resources page. Barring a miracle, this will almost certainly be the last ever release from OCCDs (and it comes a full four years after the last major issue), which is a shame. Got the site ready to update today, but the update won’t actually happen until Geoffrey is ready with some physical copies of the CD.
9th October 2015	For the time being, I’ve commented out the news item about Kickstarter from our opening page because the news is just too negative and off-putting; and there should be at least one final announcement yet, before OCCDs gives up the ghost. At some future point, once the corpse has stopped twitching, I’ll uncomment the news item again so that a full record of OCCDs’ short and lamentably commercially unsuccessful life can remain visible online, but until then we’ll pretend that Kickstarter never happened. The page is still online, but currently you can only access it via the links on this Site Changes page.
16th May 2015	Returned the site to ‘normal’ after our stinking Kickstarter campaign, which really could not have been less successful. The Kickstarter news, and page, remains online, of course, as a tombstone to quality music.
31st March 2015	Added some review comments about CD7/2009 from a really excellent new review (EnjoyTheMusic.com). Added the names of the first Kickstarter backers.
18th March 2015	Finished off work on the Kickstarter page (adding Facebook Like and Google+ +1 buttons), added a news story to the opening News page, and made the site auto-load the Kickstarter page rather than the News page for the time being (to be changed back after the project is over). Launched the Kickstarter project!
19th February 2015	Initial work has now been done on our Kickstarter project page. This is not yet visible to the public, but it’ll be linked to our opening News page just as soon as our project goes live. A small but useful general site change: added ‘pointer-events: none’ to the CSS of the heading bar, which means that it’s now possible to click through it. Primarily, this was done to make the ‘breadcrumbs’ link more easily clickable on pages that feature one (as it was previously half-obscured by the shadow of the heading bar). However, it also has the useful side-effect of making text on the page easier to select, especially if the page has been scrolled.
13th December 2014	A few minor fixes for Internet Explorer. I was using ‘IE8 emulation’ for reasons that I now forget, and it had the effect of making the new playback control entirely fail to appear! So, getting rid of that old version emulation should also make the site look better in later versions of IE. If it doesn’t work as well in old ones… tough! Also added ‘clear’s to a couple of rule-offs in the Catalogue section to make IE display them properly, in the intended place at the bottom of the page. As for the new playback control, it now appears to be working everywhere except for a handful of pages in Opera, where the sample fails to load; and that appears to be an Opera bug that I can do nothing about. With luck it’ll be fixed in due course.
11th December 2014	New sound controls! Because of recent changes in various browsers and the general deprecation of plug-ins for sound control in HTML5 etc., we were faced with the situation (particularly in Chrome and Firefox) whereby the QuickTime-based sound controls on this site were either having to be approved before they would work (Firefox) or were not working at all because of a spurious ‘missing plug-in’ message (Chrome). Therefore, although the samples themselves remain exactly the same as before, the direct use of the QuickTime plug-in has been abandoned in preference to the HTML5 audio tag. For both backwards compatibility with older browsers, though, and for the ability to have a nice, appropriately styled player, I have used the attractive and handy audiojs for the player control. This falls back to a simple Flash-based player for the more ancient browsers that are still in use but uses native audio support otherwise, with a neat control that I have styled to suit this site.
12th July 2014	Added review comments about CD12/2011 (EnjoyTheMusic.com).
31st January 2013	Added Windsong Music International Co. Ltd, our Taiwan distributor, and Aulos Media Ltd, our South Korean distributor, to our list of distributors and Links page. Added Continuo CD, our German distributor, to our list of distributors. Nothing on the Links page because sadly there’s no online presence. Also added new links, going directly to the OCCDs listings, for both Taiwan and UK distributor sites. Sarabande (Japan) currently doesn’t have per-label listings.
3rd December 2012	Added some nice quotations from a previously unknown four-CD review in the July 2012 edition of The Strad, concerning CD3/2009, CD4/2009, CD9/2009 and CD12/2011.
1st December 2012	Added some exceptionally gratifying comments about CD14/2011 in the form of a customer review (Bill Abbie).
18th November 2012	Presentation changes: Partly because of the recent award and partly to avoid stagnation, we’ve decided to revamp the structure of the site’s opening page. Hitherto, the opening News page has served a dual purpose of being an introductory page to the site as well as a news page, with background information and ‘mission statement’ before any actual news announcement. Whilst useful for newcomers, this meant that the opening page always looked much the same, and any new announcement was displaced a long way down the page, perhaps requiring scrolling. The site has probably been online for long enough now that all that introductory material is no longer necessary on the opening page, so there’s been a restructuring as follows: The introductory material that has always been on the opening News page has been moved wholesale to the About page, which is really its natural home. After the newly inserted material, the About page continues on as it did before. The About page, which was previously silent, now has the looping Novák extract that was hitherto on the News page. It should make pleasant, tranquil background music for anyone reading the extensive text on this page. The News page now has new, much shorter opening text that provides more succinct introductory material and that refers to OCCDs’ award-winning sound. It’s immediately followed by the announcements, the first of which is (at the time of writing) the German Record Critics’ Award. In recognition of the recent award, the background music has been changed to the Britten extract. The plan is to change it back to Novák once the award announcement is no longer current (i.e. there’s a newer, more recent announcement). Since there might be a bit more interest in our CNSTR recording technique after the complimentary comments relating to the award, the CNSTR logo has been added to both the opening News page and the About page as a badge. It is, of course, a clickable link to the CNSTR page. Changing the sound sample on the News page led me to check the contents of the Samples page, and I discovered to my astonishment that I’d forgotten to update the music samples index on this page since 2009! The table only indexed the samples on CDs 1 to 8; 9 to 14 were absent. So, as well as obviously correcting the information about the samples on the News and About pages, I’ve added all the missing entries. It was also necessary to update references to sound samples on the CD1/2008 and CD12/2011 pages. On a few pages I’ve revised the appearances of rule-offs for improved presentation and consistency. In the main this has meant ensuring that every page of the site finishes with a rule-off as the final item. It rounds the page off nicely and makes it clear that any list is complete. For sub-pages that link off a ‘parent’ page in the menu system, I’ve added a new ‘breadcrumbs’ feature. I’ve always been a little unhappy with the way in which such sub-pages appear to be top-level items, with the menu system’s selected-page graphic pointing at them even though they’re not the pages you arrive at when clicking on that pointer. Now, although that situation remains the same (the graphics still point, and take you back to the parent page if clicked), it makes more sense because the lineage of the page is shown as a new style of heading right at the top. The breadcrumbs feature is actually only needed on three pages: this very Site Changes page, the CNSTR insignia page and the Resources page (whose parent is About).
15th November 2012	Prize-related update: This is quite a big site update because of the fact that OCCDs has won a German Record Critics’ Award for CD12/2011. Clearly we’re highly delighted about this, not least because it recognises the outstanding sound quality that’s a feature of the entire range of CDs. The award was actually made public on 5th November (hence the date of the announcement), but significant work was required on the site and I was busy; hence I wasn’t able to finish the update until ten days later, unfortunately. Added a big announcement about the award to the main page, including a large graphical link to the CD in question. Added a little badge at the very top of the opening page: the logo for the prize we’ve just won. Although it doesn’t show up as a link, clicking it will actually take you to the CD12/2011 page. There’s also a new copy of the CD12/2011 cover graphic, now with a prize label stuck on it. This doesn’t entirely replace the previous graphic, as I want to keep the ‘clean’ version for use in regular listings, but it appears with the announcement, and on the Reviews page, and as the main graphic above the ‘Buy’ button on the CD page itself. The CD12/2011 page has received a few updates: a new info box to note that this is an award-winning CD; an updated cover graphic with badge; a separate badge logo; and a copy of the announcement about the award. The little badge logo at the top is the same as the one on the opening page and, like that badge, is also a hidden link, this time taking you to the award page on the German Record Critics’ site. Added the award verdict text from the German Record Critics’ Award as a review comment in the usual places; the boxed copy on the CD12/2011 also has its own little identifying logo. Added another extremely flattering extract from the very recent (as yet unpublished) Fanfare review of CD12/2011. Added an excellent review extract for CD14/2011 from the current issue of Fanfare. Finally, a slightly regrettable update: an Erratum section, and updated track listing, for the Peter Katin Chopin Recital, CD11/2010. This corrects track 9 from one to three Mazurkas. Peter failed to give Geoffrey correct programme information, Geoffrey failed to notice that there were three pieces rather than one, and I didn’t have time to listen to the CD properly when creating the inlays because everything had to be done in such a rush (fourteen CDs in ten days!). I did, in fact, spot another problem with the track listing of this CD in time to correct it, but sadly not this one.
4th November 2012	Silly me! I’d forgotten that the review quotations relating to multiple CDs (rather than specific ones) were duplicated on the Sampler CD page, and not just confined to the top of the Reviews page. So I’ve now copied over the three missing ones.
25th October 2012	Added a very nice review comment about CD3/2009 from the December 2012 issue of BBC Music Magazine. (It’s still only October, but the December issue is already out!) The quotation is actually the entire review: certainly short, but also sweet.
4th October 2012	Added a nice review comment about the entire range of fourteen CDs from Bob Walters, Bay Area Audiophile Society.
10th August 2012	Added review comments about CD4/2009 and CD11/2010 (BBC Music Magazine), including a ★★★★★ performance rating for Peter Katin’s Chopin. Changed the four-star Audiophile Audition ratings (CDs 1, 3 and 5) to use proper ★ characters rather than asterisks.
23rd June 2012	Added review comments about CD3/2009 (Musical Pointers). I also take pleasure (without quoting it elsewhere on the site) in the fact that the writer says, “The Orchestral Concert CDs interactive website is excellent”! Added Geoffrey’s Remembering Alfredo Campoli text to the CD3/2009 page.
22nd June 2012	Added a couple of review comments (our first) from Gramophone: a general comment about the OCCDs issues (Reviews page only) and specific comments about CD12/2011 from Rob Cowan’s Replay column in the July 2012 issue (page 90).
13th June 2012	Lots of new reviews added – one for each CD! This is thanks to the appearance of an excellent two-page feature about the entire Orchestral Concert CDs range in the June 2012 issue of International Record Review. Lots of nice things were said about every CD in the catalogue. On the Resources page, added a new column of entries in order to provide the unadorned cover graphics in JPEG format as well as PNG, which was previously provided exclusively. Whilst it seems surprising that this was necessary, apparently the use of PNG was causing difficulties in particular instances, so now we have a choice. Also amended the wording in reference to this table to provide more explanation and a contact link.
5th June 2012	Added review comments about CD5/2009 from a previously overlooked MusicWeb International review. Corrected the chronological ordering of a couple of review quotations for CD1/2008.
31st May 2012	Added review comments about CD11/2010 (MusicWeb International). At last, every disc in the catalogue has now received at least one positive review (positive enough to be quoted on this site)! Made a minor CSS improvement: the external link icon no longer has its bottom row of pixels clipped when it appears in a review box.
27th May 2012	Added a customer comment about CD12/2011 (Violinist.com forum). Added a logo for Discovery Records Ltd in our list of distributors and on the Links page.
4th–11th May 2012	Added review comments about CD13/2011 (MusicWeb International). Added Discovery Records Ltd (UK) to our list of distributors and Links page. Added review comments about CD14/2011 (MusicWeb International). Eradicated all links to Czech Music Direct from this site, and removed its entry from the Links page. References remain in the interests of fair attribution and credit relating to reviews and other material, but all ties with this organisation are now severed. Scratch that. Eradicated all references to Czech Music Direct, as no comment whatsoever is certainly the most advisable choice.
12th February 2012	Added a nice customer review comment about CD12/2011 (referring to the Britten recording in particular) from ‘GBS’, a retired BBC engineer and an audiophile, who describes this recording as “demonstration quality”. On the strength of the sound quality produced by this CD, he has cancelled his plans to upgrade his existing hi-fi system!
4th January 2012	I made a silly mistake with the new CD cover graphics (the ones in mock CD boxes, used to illustrate this site). Although they looked fine to the uncritical eye (and the problem escaped my attention for several weeks), I had actually forgotten the hinge! My ‘Virtual Concert Hall Series’ spine graphic extended from the bottom edge of the spine to the top, right inside the arms of the hinged front. But, of course, on a real CD box, two plastic walls are needed for those arms to plug into, and I’d forgotten to include them in my mockup CD box. So now I’ve created suitable additions to the basic graphic and regenerated all the cover images. I don’t imagine for a moment that anyone will notice, but it satisfies my quest for perfection if nothing else. I do think the little CD-case icons look even better now. More to the point, the much larger versions (as can be found on the Resources page) needed the walls much more urgently. I haven’t used those large graphics anywhere yet, but will need them very shortly for an advertising leaflet.
1st January 2012	Happy New Year! Added review comments about CD12/2011 (MusicWeb International). Having discovered that Miloš Zelenka was the conductor for CD9/2009, this information has been added to the page itself and to the many indices throughout the site (including adding a Zelenka entry in the Artist index). It was also necessary to update the metadata of Track 9 on the Sampler CD, and indeed to update the PDF of its booklet to list the name on the inner pages.
2nd December 2011	Changed the Ordering page to have a Distributors section rather than a Partner Sites heading, and added to it our new Japanese distributor, Sarabande Co. Ltd; with luck, more will be added in future. Removed Czech Music Direct from this page, as they no longer sell OCCDs recordings. Also removed the link to Czech Music Direct’s page selling OCCDs discs from our Links page, as the linked page no longer listed any of our CDs. Other links to Czech Music Direct remain, however. Added Sarabande to the Links page, too.
30th November 2011	Major update! (Now finally complete!) Finally revised the opening Welcome/News page in light of the new commercially-pressed Virtual Concert Hall Series CD issues. Revised and updated all the introductory text at the top of the page, expanded and embellished the ‘Major Announcement’ section, and presented a list of all the new CD covers. (This is a copy of the Cover Overview page content, in fact.) This Major Announcement section will disappear in due course and be replaced once again by the temporarily-disabled Latest Release(s) section, once there’s yet another new CD, but for the moment we need to highlight that the entire range has been updated. And that’s it; the update to the site is finally complete.
28th November 2011	Major update! (a further interlude…) I realised that I was quite irritated by the loss of the pink dress. Yes, it’s a silly and totally inconsequential thing to be bothered about. Yes, actually doing anything about it would be an utter waste of time. But nevertheless, being the person I am, I just had to. So I Photoshopped the pink dress back in. It’s not perfect: the best original copy of the photo I had (the book cover scan) was of a very low resolution; much too low to be really useful, and far lower than the picture with the recoloured grey dress, so detail has been lost. Nevertheless, the overall effect is OK, and reintroduces the authentic element to the picture. I like it much better than the grey version; that splash of pink adds character to the whole image.
27th November 2011	Major update! (an interlude…) Replaced the picture of the Brno Philharmonic Orchestra on the opening News page with a nicer version that I found while working on the new CD material. It’s the same photo; just a much clearer and sharper version of it. The old one was faded, yellowed and stretched, whereas the new one is crisp and clear. I’ve kept the size the same and cropped the new photo to match the old; the only difference, apart from clarity, is that the new version has slightly more vertical detail (no feet chopped off!); the old one was about 15% taller than it should have been. Just one oddity: in the original picture, there was a lady in a pink dress, just above and to the right of the centre of the picture. In the new version of the shot now used here, she’s dressed in black! Clearly someone felt that she stuck out like a sore thumb and colour-processed her dress. Although they were right that she stuck out, the pink did give the picture a splash of colour, which has now been lost, and it’s a bit of a shame, particularly as this was an official photo that was used (including the pink dress) as the cover of a 50th anniversary commemorative book about the Brno Philharmonic. Under the circumstances, I’d have kept the pink myself.
26th November 2011	Major update! (continued…) Today, my own copies of all the commercially manufactured CDs arrived. They’re fantastic! Incredibly, it seems I made a stupid mistake with the updated Sampler CD. Inexplicably, I got it into my head that the CD10 sample track was from Tod und Verklärung, when in fact it was from the last movement of Dvořák’s Symphony no 8. (This was based on a misreading of something, not on listening to the track!) So, to fix this I’ve had to edit the track itself (to correct the metadata), fix the CD inlays, regenerate the SamplerCD.zip archive containing them, and fix all the instances (including an index page) on the site that were wrong as a result. Ho-hum. That’s presumably what happens when I work too late… my eyes start jumping lines. Added a whole new page of downloadable resources (CD covers in a couple of formats, plus some OCCDs logos), linked from the About page, for use by reviewers and distributors who want to be able to use OCCDs CD covers in other pages. Previously, either they’ve had to mangle one of my ‘plastic CD’ cover graphics or scan an inlay. Added new review quotations about CD7/2009 and CD10/2010. Corrected all fourteen CD pages. Primarily this was to update the timings to match the real CDs, but I also fixed a few small inconsistencies and outdated details.
21st November 2011	Major update! (continued…) Updated all aspects of the Sampler CD page to list all its tracks correctly; created new sound samples for all tracks (previous and new) in MP3 format, and also decided to include AAC versions in the full download archive for added quality. Corrected lots of mistakes in the existing track listings on the Sampler CD page. I was amazed to discover that I’d forgotten to include orchestra and conductor information for most of these tracks before now! Added appropriate references to the Sampler CD tracks on the CD 10 to CD 14 pages. Changed Frédéric Chopin to Fryderyk, as per Peter Katin’s preferences in his booklet notes. There’s still a fair bit more to do to the site before the update is finished, but it’ll have to wait a few days, unfortunately. Added a Major Announcement section to the opening page. More details to be added when I have time.
20th November 2011	Major update! In recent weeks I’ve had my work cut out, creating professional-quality CD booklets, tray inlays and labels as a result of having CDs 1 to 14 pressed commercially. The CDs have thus all changed in appearance, are now of high commercial quality, and all have brand new cover graphics. Nine retain the same basic cover images as before, but five do not, and all have changed to a greater or lesser extent. The changes to the site are primarily related to the new commercially pressed issues. Created new CD icons for all discs on the site. Generated a new Sampler CD (CD0/2011 replaces CD0/2009) and updated all references to it. Added the sampler to extra entries in the indices, thanks to the presence of five new tracks. (The new sampler loses the unidentified organ track from CD0/2009, retains all nine other tracks from the previous sampler, and adds five new tracks.) Corrected the spelling of Annelies Burmeister’s name (no e on the end of Annelies) and added the accented ł in Wiłkomirska.
25th September 2011	Added review comments about CD8/2009 (MusicWeb International). Made a small CSS change to improve the layout of CD listing pages, as the handling of the inline-table display property seems to have changed in recent versions of WebKit (Safari 5.1+).
23rd September 2011	Fixed a minor problem in Firefox 4+, in which contextual alternative (swash) characters would appear instead of normal ones in the Warnock Pro font if available on the user’s system. Thanks to ‘frboyer’ on Mozilla Support for the necessary information on how to do this.
6th September 2011	Added a comment by Joel Flegler, editor/publisher of Fanfare, about the OCCDs Shostakovich 10 recording to the CD14/2011 and Reviews pages.
19th August 2011	Corrected the recording date of CD14/2011 to 6th March 1968 throughout the site, and amended all references to the Smetáček recording on the Recordings page to that date.
12th August 2011	Added a review comment about CD2/2008 from Dr David Wright.
24th July 2011	Added CD13/2011 and CD14/2011 to the catalogue, along with all the site changes that such additions entail. Replaced the CD11/2010 cover graphic with a new version, since the background green colour had to be replaced with grey for production reasons. Decreased the prominance of the Site News section on the opening page, since there’s rarely anything of interest to say there and it ends up just looking out of date. Decided to replace the announcement simply with a reference to the date of the last update, with a link to this Site Changes page for more information.
11th May 2011	Small change to the opening page to try to make browsers refrain from caching it, thus reducing the likelihood of outdated pages appearing when there’s been a recent update.
3rd April 2011	Halved the length of the CD12/2011 sample track so that the page no longer plays the entire movement. Now we hear just the first four minutes or so, followed by a fade-out.
20th March 2011	Added CD12/2011 to the catalogue. Made a number of improvements to the listings in the Catalogue>Index by Artist page.
30th November 2010	Huddersfield Town Hall recording of Brahms 4 added to the Recordings page.
10th November 2010	Added a link to Peter Katin’s Web site on the Links page.
2nd November 2010	Added a nice ‘review’ comment about CD4/2009 from Jean-Gaspard Páleníček, grandson of the pianist recorded on the CD.
24th September 2010	Added a link on the Links page to the articles about audio equipment at Favorite-Classical-Composers.com at the request of that site’s owner; hoping for a reciprocal link back! Added hosting information (including links to Just Host) on the About page.
12th September 2010	Fixed an obscure problem with the layout of covers on the Cover Overview page for Firefox users. Previously, dragging a cover link and releasing it would leave it in the active state (with ‘focus’), but this focussed-state version would have the wrong padding and background image position settings if the pointer wasn’t hovering over it, and that would alter the size of the highlighted box and mess up the entire layout flow. Now we cater specifically for this focussed state (and also suppress Firefox’s irritating dotted border around the covers), so the behaviour is wholly consistent with the normal ‘active’ state. (This issue doesn’t affect WebKit-based browsers, which don’t use focus in this way.)
16th August 2010	I’m not really superstitious, but disasters that strike on Friday 13th do make you wonder…! The orchestralconcertcds.com domain name expired without warning on that date, having not been transferred (as expected and assumed) to the new hosting company, leaving the Web site inaccessible and the email addresses non-working. Swift action was taken by Geoffrey to remedy the problem, but it left us offline for a couple of days and forced us to adopt a new address in order to return swiftly to view. The new domain chosen was occds.org, which has the advantage of being much shorter and easier to type. At the time of writing, orchestralconcertcds.com is out of action, though we hope to regain it very soon, at which point it’ll work just as it did before, as an alternative to the new name. However, we’ve decided to move to using the new domain in preference to the old in future, since the old domain is pretty cumbersome. I’ve therefore changed all references in email addresses to point to the new domain on this site. In future, either domain should work. Update: mere minutes after writing the above, we have regained the orchestralconcertcds.com domain, and it’s now working again as before. Added a new paragraph to the About page, under an Addresses heading, explaining the choice of domain name.
8th July 2010	Added reviews from American Record Guide to CDs 1, 3, 4, 8 and 9. Temporarily (I hope) removed the dividers above the text headings on the CD 2, 7 and 9 pages, since an apparently new bug in WebKit (affecting Safari 5 and other WebKit-based browsers such as Google Chrome) causes these dividers to fail to truncate to the left of the floating review boxes, thus forcing them and their following text down the page, with a huge gap before them. This ruins the page layout. I hope Apple fixes this annoyance soon… I intend to restore the dividers as soon as the bug is fixed.
1st July 2010	Added a new entry to the Recordings table (Stravinsky Pulcinella).
26th June 2010	Added another photo to the About page (Ančerl, Terry, Turnovský) and made a few small layout tweaks.
24th June 2010	Added a couple of photographs to illustrate the story on the About page.
21st June 2010	Added an interesting and entertaining personal recollection, by Geoffrey Terry, about how the recordings came to be made to the About page.
17th June 2010	Added Czech Music Direct’s Czech Music Radio Show, about Orchestral Concert CDs, to the Samples page and added a reference to it on the About page.
11th June 2010	Added review comments about CD6/2009 (MusicWeb International).
7th June 2010	Added a review comment about CD9/2009 (MusicWeb International).
3rd June 2010	Added a couple of new entries to the Recordings table (Szymanowski and Dukas), and corrected a few wrong details (Huddersfield Town Hall added!).
31st May 2010	Added a comment about CD1/2008 from Martin Anderson’s interview with Geoffrey Terry in Fanfare 33:5 to the reviews.
30th May 2010	The offer of free worldwide shipping has now ended. The site has now reverted to the previous shipping charges, as detailed on the Ordering page. Added review comments about CD2/2008 (MusicWeb International) and CD7/2009 (private customer feedback).
20th May 2010	The recording date of the concert presented on CD9/2009 has been discovered; updated the various pages of the site to include it.
1st May 2010	Added a couple of review comments about CD1/2008. Received another very nice compliment from Robert Kellner, of Bertels Klassik-Ecke in Germany, via private email to Geoffrey Terry: “[Your Web site] is a very professional and informative resource that is a great pleasure to navigate so easily, your webmaster has done a superb job here indeed!”
18th April 2010	Added CD11/2010 to the catalogue.
30th March 2010	Received a lovely compliment via private email from the splendid Dr Howard Oakley (of MacUser magazine fame): “[Y]our website is gorgeous, and a joy to listen to!”
25th March 2010	Added CD10/2010 to the catalogue. Reorganised the opening Welcome/News page: the temporary splash about free shipping has been demoted to a single line of body text and the Sampler CD has been moved out of the Latest Releases section to have its own permanent box at the right of the page, where the free-shipping splash was previously.
14th February 2010	Shipping is now free worldwide: updated the Ordering page to reflect this, and added a splash to the opening News page.
11th February 2010	An important improvement: the CD-specific reviews that appear on the Reviews page are now replicated in floating boxes on the CDs’ pages themselves. Non-specific reviews appear on the Sampler CD page. Added quotations from Fanfare’s reviews of CDs 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 to the Reviews page. We choose not to quote from the double-review of CDs 1 and 4 for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who reads it. Added dividers between the review sections on the Reviews page, since the greatly increased quantity of text was beginning to make the boundaries between reviews unclear. On the CD7/2009 page, added composer accreditation for the Czechoslovak National Anthem in the track-listing table, and added similar information to all index pages; added a Škroup entry in the Composer index (replacing the previous Other entry). Corrected some strange but insignificant markup errors that had somehow got into the Welcome page. Fixed a couple of tiny problems with the opening index page (the one that immediately redirects to the Welcome section).
25th January 2010	Added quotations from MusicWeb International’s review of CD4/2009 to the Reviews page.
18th January 2010	Added a new comment from Don Hansen about CD1/2008 to the Reviews page. Corrected the date of Norman Lebrecht’s comment about CD1/2008 on the Reviews page.
17th January 2010	Added a new comment from Norman Lebrecht about CD2/2008 to the Reviews page.
6th January 2010	Finally got around to creating new header-bar graphics (“Alert!” and error-triangle logo) for the 404 Page not found error page. As I have recently set up a couple of email accounts to accompany the site, various references to email addresses have now been updated to reflect this fact. All instances of Geoffrey Terry’s previous Yahoo address have been replaced with Info@OrchestralConcertCDs.com, whereas some contact details for me have been changed to Webmaster@OrchestralConcertCDs.com, though I’ve also retained a couple of instances of Richard@Hallas.net for matters that may be considered personal rather than directly related to this site. Added a new contact address for myself on the About page, in my capacity as Webmaster.
8th November 2009	Quoted Norman Lebrecht’s brief review of CD1/2008 on the Reviews page. Corrected a couple of 2008 references that should have been 2009 on this Changes page and on the Reviews page.
20th November 2009	Added a quotation from the Editor/Publisher of Audiophile Audition to the Reviews page.
13th November 2009	Added ‘A charged performance’ to the CD7/2009 page.
12th November 2009	Added ‘A tribute to Alexandr (Saša) Večtomov’ to the CD9/2009 page.
9th November 2009	Added CD9/2009 to the catalogue and updated all relevant pages of the site as appropriate. Added dagger-footnotes to all CD pages (i.e. CDs 1 to 9) to indicate which tracks are excerpted on the Sampler CD, and provided a direct link to the Sampler CD. Thus, as well as the sound sample for each CD on the CD’s page, there is also a note of which other track can be heard via the site. CD1/2008 is unique in having a total of three excerpts (the extra one being the Novák sample on the site’s opening page). Updated the cover of CD5/2009 to reflect reality rather than a pre-release image (terracotta rather than grey background). Updated the cover of CD3/2009 to reflect the final release (only minor differences). Changed the date (in all relevant places) of the Fairfield Halls, Croydon performances on CD3/2009 from the previous “c. 1972” to the newly-discovered actual date of 24th September 1963. Updated and corrected some details on the Recordings page (e.g. In Nature’s Realm was previously entitled “(TBC)”).
8th November 2009	Added quotations from Audiophile Audition’s review of CD5/2009 to the Reviews page.
27th October 2009	Added a quotation from Audiophile Audition’s nice new review of CD1/2008 to the Reviews page. Added day and rating information to the previous Audiophile Audition review quotation.
26th October 2009	Added CD8/2009 to the catalogue and updated all relevant pages of the site as appropriate.
25th October 2009	Regenerated the Jan Novák track that plays when the site opens. It should sound much the same as before (the MP3 quality is the same), but I’ve used the newly remastered version of the CD that Geoffrey has just sent me, and it removes an audible mono/stereo glitch that was previously present at around the 1:00 mark. I’ve also taken the opportunity to make the sample about three seconds longer in order to incorporate the little bridge passage that leads into the repeat of the opening music, to take advantage of the fact that this particular track loops. It’s not perfect because there's an unavoidable small gap when the loop happens, and the final note of the clarinet in the scalar bridge passage overlaps with the opening music repeat, and hence has had to be omitted. Nevertheless, I think it’s an improvement on balance. Created a new sample track for the CD1/2008 page and added a note that the Novák sample can be heard on the opening News page. Updated the Samples page to reflect this. On the Samples page, the index table of samples was less clear than I felt it should be because it was difficult in some cases to differentiate rows within the table. Therefore I’ve added single-pixel row dividers between entries. Added a favourable comment from the Editor of the Anton Bruckner Symphony Versions Discography to the Reviews page.
22nd October 2009	Whoops! Prokofiev’s 3rd Piano Concerto is in C major, not C minor! Corrected references on the CD2/2008, CD0/2009 and Samples pages. Added quotations from MusicWeb International’s review of CD7/2009 to the Reviews page. Removed double attributions from the first two CD reviews on the Reviews page. Now the two separate paragraph quotations share a single attribution at the bottom, just as with the newly-added CD7/2009 entry. Supplied missing title and venue info for the Suk Fairy Tale entry on the Recordings page.
3rd October 2009	Added a quotation from Audiophile Audition’s review of CD3/2009 to the Reviews page.
15th September 2009	Added an introductory sentence to the Sampler CD page.
13th September 2009	Shock, horror! A visitor found a broken link on the Samples page! This caused me to (a) fix the link and (b) install a custom 404 error page, to handle any similar future problems more gracefully.
10th September 2009	Minor fixes and corrections, including the removal of an outdated ‘for sale by’ info box on CD6/2009, which has been on sale officially for some time. Geoffrey also finally got the PayPal buttons working properly again, after unwanted amounts of sales tax had mysteriously started being added to all the CDs. I hope this hasn’t killed any sales, but unfortunately it happened just at the time when we got a lot of new visitors from Martin Hansen’s interview article with me at RISCOScode, so it probably did.
7th September 2009	Added a very nice comment from George Schatzkamer, a satisfied customer, to the Reviews page.
3rd September 2009	Added a downloadable Sampler CD to the site. Indexed the new CD into the catalogue pages as though it were a regular release, with the exception of the chronological index. Added new entries to the composer, artist, orchestra and venue indices to accommodate the last two tracks of the Sampler CD, which currently represent as-yet-unreleased material. Removed the ‘new’ badge from all CDs except the Sampler in the overview and complete index pages. Corrected a small mistake (keyword metadata) in the CD6/2009 page. Updated a few small details in the Recordings page. Added a reference to the Sampler CD in the Samples page. Changed the opening News page to announce the release of the Sampler CD, removing the five previous cover-only entries for CDs 3 to 7.
10th August 2009	Today the hosting company was changed from VodaHost to JustHost, and there was a very brief outage while the site was re-uploaded to the new server. Added extracts from a review of CD3/2009 to the Reviews page.
9th July 2009	New cover graphic created for CD5/2009 to reflect the changed design.
7th July 2009	Successfully worked around an annoying problem that caused WebKit-based browsers (notably Safari) sometimes to fail to draw the wooden (and shadowed) background part of the menu until the page was updated in some way (perhaps by scrolling it or opening a menu over it). Now, I hope it’ll always appear on the initial load. The only apparent down-side to this change is that the site now works even less well in IE 5 on the Mac; but since that obsolete browser isn’t supported anyway, and isn’t capable of rendering the site in a usable manner, that’s hardly important.
5th July 2009	Added an entry for the Bruckner Discography on the Links page.
2nd July 2009	Added a new top-level page called Recordings to the Information section of the menu system, which of course also required the creation of a new menu button. The purpose of the new page is to list the complete set of recordings that will ultimately be issued on CD, and link to the appropriate CD pages for those recordings that have already been released. Future issues are shown in grey; those that have been released are coloured in. Some details are a little sketchy at present, but the table will be updated as appropriate in due course. For the moment it provides a pretty complete overview of what’s available for release. The new page appears in the Information section because, strictly speaking, it isn’t part of the catalogue. In due course, once every recording in the table has been issued, it will indeed provide a summary index of the catalogue, and at that stage may possibly change sections. However, for the moment at least, it is provided for the purposes of information, to give an idea of what’s to come as well as permitting works to be looked up in an alternative way from the regular catalogue indices.
21st June 2009	A logistical problem with CD6/2009 means that it must be temporarily withheld; CD page updated to indicate a release date of 1st August.
19th June 2009	Added an entry (with logo) for the FRMS on the Links page. Arranged the Links page contents into alphabetical order.
10th June 2009	I just remembered that I hadn’t updated the print stylesheet when I updated the collapsing-index system used on four of the index pages, with the result that the Composer, Artist, Orchestra and Venue index pages would no longer print out correctly. I’ve made the necessary changes to fix this, so printing now works as intended again. Received a lovely compliment from Martin Hansen (via Facebook), which I record here as a personal ego-boost: “That’s an impressively slick and tasteful site, Richard. [...] I really like the C inside the O logo too [...]” Very gratifying.
9th June 2009	Replaced the cover image for CD3 for the last time, and removed its launch date as it is now approved and available.
7th June 2009	A massive improvement! Totally revised the four ‘index by’ pages with collapsing indices. The first version of the collapsing index system hid the CD entries below the titles and revealed them when the titles were hovered over. Expanding and collapsing the entries disturbed the vertical scroll position of the page and was generally rather hit-and-miss, in that it was rather too easy to hide or reveal things accidentally. It was also rather difficult to access results towards the bottom of the list. This previous system has now been scrapped in favour of a much superior one that reveals the results in a large column to the right of the page area, to the right of the index titles. This no longer has any effect on the page scrolling, the results are easier to see, and the whole thing is far easier to navigate. I always had reservations about my initial, rather experimental system, but I’m very much happier with the replacement. The new system also works (admittedly with limited success) on the iPhone’s Mobile Safari browser. Added a ‘Chronology’ title to the date index and other one-word titles to the other ‘index by’ pages to make their purpose easier to spot without the need to look at the menu pointer or window title. In all of the ‘index by’ pages, the individual entries can appear at a standard height that accommodates ‘everything’ or a slightly less tall version for listings that don’t need the full height. The composer index page was previously the only page to use short entries because none of the CD entries in that set of listings required the full standard height. Now, though, I have optimised all the listing pages (including the chronology) to use short or standard listings on a per-section basis. This has meant that the number of short entries has increased greatly (they’re now in the large majority). The main thing is that each collapsing section should be internally consistent; all entries should be the same height within each section. The use of the shorter form within each section means that the entries are more efficient because they require less screen height. Replaced the cover image for CD3 (and amended its launch date) at the request of Peter Katin.
5th June 2009	Finally fixed the one remaining IE7 annoyance: removed an unwanted gap between the last menu item and the shading at the top of the ‘wooden panel’ below the menu. IE7 was the only browser to put a gap here (excepting IE8 in IE7 compatibility mode), due to a bug which I’ve worked around at last. Swapped the order of the menu footer (which provides the menu’s wooden background) and the menu itself, so that the footer comes first. This allows the NetSurf browser (version 2.1 tested) to display the menu nearly correctly, whereas previously it slapped the wooden background graphic over all the buttons, so that nothing could be seen. This site is now usable (though far from perfect) in NetSurf, which is good because NetSurf is the only native browser that can even make an attempt at rendering this site for users of RISC OS computers. Improved the ‘favicon’ site icon to have transparency and thus look more circular in various situations.
30th May 2009	Maintenance update: Recreated all the CD entries in the index pages, plus those in the News and Reviews pages. I had stretched the rules of HTML with my initial versions of these listing, and although they seemed to work fine in all the major browsers, it turned out that the technically invalid HTML upset some browsers in unexpected ways. IE7 had minor problems (though IE6 and IE8 were OK), but, most importantly, Firefox behaved extremely strangely. It worked perfectly with my local files on my own system, but rendered the same pages unpredictably when they were online. (Reloading would correct the problem, but it was totally inexplicable.) This was an unacceptable situation, so I spent some time devising an alternative way of creating the CD index links with entirely valid HTML. I had wanted to do this anyway, as using invalid HTML went against my instincts. The Mac browser iCab proved particularly helpful in validating the pages. Expanded the site info on the About page to add details about fonts and links, and, now that the site code is all fully validated, included logos for Valid XHTML, Valid CSS and Let iCab smile. Added this Change Log page.
25th May 2009	8:00pm: Launch of this new Orchestral Concert CDs site! CDs 3 to 7 (inclusive) are listed as the latest releases.