IMPORTANT THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW BEFORE BUYING...

1. This rom was produced on PCs with Microsoft Word html layout tools. It is a revised and expanded version of the 2007 CD-Rom, with tons of extras. The whole rom is static page layouts with hyperlinks in the manner of a website, and is best run at half the screen width of a modern widescreen monitor.

2. It has been tested with Firefox, Microsoft Explorer & Edge, Chrome and the free browser that is included. On many systems you may need to adjust settings for the audio and video elements to play. We are told that it also functions fine on Apple computers and other devices. Again, you may need to adjust settings (including adding the wmv codec) for audio/video elements to work correctly. We cannot guarantee that all elements will run correctly on all systems. However, as the whole rom is basic html with no scripts or plug-ins it should work on almost anything that has an html browser.

3. image quality. All basic discography pictures are thumbnails of 200x200px. Expanded album views are 340x340px. Photo gallery images are at the best possible for a consistent layout. Press clip images are displayed at large readable resolution whenever possible. Image sizes are a trade-off between what we can legally use without infringing copyright and file size. 

4. audio/video quality. The mp3s are at the lowest resolution (56kbps) that sounds fine on a computer system. Again, this is a trade-off, between what we could get permission for from artists/labels, and what wouldn't take up too much space. The videos are what were supplied to us by artists, or what we could get artists to agree to. Had we included all audio at full resolution and videos as large screen we would have well exceeded the capacity of a DVD and also created a download too large for many people to access/download/install.

5. price. This reflects 12 years extra work since the 2007 edition (which sold at GBP 20), and an extra 1gb of data/images.etc. These days, such a wealth of knowledge at your fingertips is a bargain at GBP 30*. (* online prices vary. The actual recommended retail of the DVD-Rom is GBP 40)

6. To be able to use the zip download or zipped usb stick versions you need an unzipping tool. Windows comes with a zip tool, although you may find programs such as winrar or 7zip work much faster. Similar tools are available for mac/Apple systems. Some mobile/cell/tablet systems may not support zip files and will need to be extracted on a computer system before installing. Why is the usb version supllied as a zip archive? To copy the whole rom as individual unzipped files takes approximately 40 minutes. To copy the zip archive takes less than 5 minutes. Unzipping instructions/advice is also included on the usb stick.