A few years ago, we pieced together a recommendation system for this website. You know how this works: you visit a CD or DVD page, and a small aside gives you a list of “other releases you might like.” The old version gave some interesting results, but was usually biased towards best sellers, namely empreintes DIGITALes releases.

These skewed results are now a thing of the past, thanks to a radical rewrite of our suggestions sytem based on the principles laid out in Toby Segaran’s book Programming Collective Intelligence (O’Reilly, 2007).

As with every automated system, you’ve got to somewhat excuse the computer’s candid ignorance of all the mysterious subtleties of human taste. Yet, we have found that the new system, based as it is on stronger statistical principles, gives noticeably better advice, and we hope that they will boldly guide you to new, uncharted waters.

As usual, please don’t hesitate to tell us of your questions and comments. Our suggestion box is at the bottom of each page. —David, webmaster

The concert Éclats de vie — presented during the Akousma (6) festival — featuring the work of Chantal Dumas and Lionel Marchetti received the “2009-10 Opus Prize: Concert of the Year — actuelle and electroacoustic music” at the 14th Opus Prize Gala on January 30, 2011 in Montréal.

Yesterday at the 14th Opus Prize Gala in Montréal Jean-François Denis — the director of empreintes DIGITALes which was celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2010 — was presented with the ”2009-10 Opus Prize: Artistic Director of the Year.” Francis Dhomont’s Études pour Kafka was awarded the “2009-10 Opus Prize: Disc of the Year — Musique actuelle, Electroacoustics.”

As you have probably noticed, the new version of the electrocd.com website has been launched January 1st, 2011. Since then, we have received several congratulations messages from our visitors (for which we thank you all), but also some bug reports, mostly coming from Internet Explorer users.

We have worked hard to fix those problems, which affected audio playback and home page “top shelf” display. According to our preliminary tests, these modules are now fully functional.

Of course, other bugs are bound to pop up. For example, we have noticed that the shopping cart failed to do anything under certain “high security” settings of Internet Explorer. We are working on this and hope to obtain results in the coming days.

Until then, keep your eyes open! Your comments are always useful to us. So, if you stumble upon another anomaly, don’t hesitate, contact us using the Suggestions Box at the bottom of each page. Thank you!

DIFFUSION i MéDIA celebrates 16 years of online presence with the release of a brand new version of its electrocd.com website. And starting January 1st, 2011, for only one month, we offer a 16% rebate on absolutely every disc, magazine, and book available in… The Electroacoustic Music Store! And a happy new year to all of you!

The great countdown has started: only 7 days before the official release of the new content-rich electrocd.com website. In the works since July, the beta version was discreetly placed online in September. Since, adjustments, debugging, polishing, finishing, and validation steps have been completed (enough) to declare that it is now ready. At the edge 2010 and ’11.