The official LaLa.com Thread

I have had 4 in the last month...

One douche sent me the front cover book for KISS "Lick it Up" and the cd sleeve thing...but it was emoty and he never answered my PM's about it...The lala-lope was pristine so I know it was not stolen or "lost" that way...whatadink!!

The next 2 I got were sans back art....argh!!!!

Still awaiting one cd....but it's definitely dying...sadly.

Yeah, my last couple without back art have really taken the steam out of me. I hate it. Usually I can at least find art to scan but this one I can't find anywhere. When (IFFFFF!!!) I break even, I'm done.

The art gamble always sucked. SwapaCD isn't as good as lala, but they guarantee all the art. If you don't get it, you don't pay. They also guarantee the tracklisting. If you request a version with bonus tracks, you don't have to pay if you don't get it. The only time you have to be a little lenient in this is when the database only lists a version with bonus tracks or a remaster. But even then you can simply send a PM and ask if it's that version and work something out.

SwapaCD is everything lala should be. They just don't have the same amount of discs in the trade pool.

Yeah, I like Swapacd but it's true, what they have (or accept) is incredibly shallow and limited.

scottmitchell74 wrote:

Yeah, I like Swapacd but it's true, what they have (or accept) is incredibly shallow and limited.

They use the same database as lala, so everything that's on lala is on SwapaCD. Their search feature isn't as intuitive, though. If you search for the band America, it returns every band with the name "America" in it and every album with title or song with the word "America" in it. It's a pain in the balls. And then bands like W.A.S.P. don't translate into URLs appropriately. It'll come back with an error when you click on an album title. You have to go up to address bar and add the periods between each letter of "wasp". It's the same for every album/band name with periods or special characters.

But SwapaCD are gearing up for an upgrade of their own and these problems are supposed to be fixed. They haven't updated their database in months, though. That sucks.

Direct shipping is going away with 3.0. So hopefully people will start trading again. They can still do dummy trades, I guess, but we'll see...

Talk about a score! Some new chick to SwapaCD just hooked me up with some killer incoming discs:

After Forever - Decipher
After Forever - Prison Of Desire
Beseech - Drama
Beto Vazquez - Infinity
Edenbridge - Arcana
Lana Lane - Curious Goods (2CD)
The Gathering - Downfall: The Early Years (2CD)
Trail Of Tears - Profoundemonium

Hope they all arrive in good shape!

The new LaLa SUCKS! That place just get further and further away from anything useful for me and they still owe me several CDs. I have 350 CDs on my want list and nothing for months.

I concur with Scott....

I don't like swap a cd either....

I hate everything....swapadvd is really crap...I sent out like 4 dvds when I enrolled and have yet to get anything from them....

Whoa. Sounds like I'm not missing anything since I've been on "vacation mode" @ Lala for the past year. I wonder if my account even still exists??

Oh well, it was fun for me while it lasted.

Man, I love SwapaCD and DVD. SwapaDVD is much slower, though. What I do is simply transfer credits from SwapaDVD to PaperbackSwap or SwapaCD. Fine by me that you guys hate the site; more cool stuff for me! =)

How do you transfer you SWAPACRAP...I tried to shift my DVD account to CD but it only allows from the book one to cd one...or am I retarded...

scottmitchell74 wrote:

Yeah, I like Swapacd but it's true, what they have (or accept) is incredibly shallow and limited.

They use the same database lala uses. Although they haven't updated it all year, which is pretty lame. They planned an upgrade a while ago, but have been having issues, I think. I don't think they intended the database to go 6 months (no 2008 releases) without being updated.

Plus their search feature, like I said before, returned too many crap results. If I search for On Through The Night, the results returned shouldn't include every band name or album with a song title that has the words "on," "through," "the," and "night." But it does. So the best way is to go to the advanced search, or search by genre.

I have gotten some sweet CDs through them, though. If thier interface becomes more user-friendly in the next update, more people will likely switch.

Shiney wrote:

How do you transfer you SWAPACRAP...I tried to shift my DVD account to CD but it only allows from the book one to cd one...or am I retarded...

There's a link on the sites that says TRANSFER CREDITS. Just click on it. There will be icons that show the SwapaCD and PaperbackSwap (PBS) logos. It's kind of confusing, though. It looks like this:

PBS Logo ---> SwapaDVD Logo ---> PBS Logo
SwapaCD Logo ---> SwapaDVD Logo ---> SwapaCD Logo

Basically, the arrows are links. If you want to swap credit from SwapaCD to SwapaDVD, click the first arrow. If you want to transfer credits from SwapaDVD to SwapaCD, click the second arrow (you must have at least 2 credits, because the rate is 2 SwapaDVD credits for 3 SwapaCD credits).

Words would have been better, but they got too fancy. Either way, for me this works.

Quote :

The new LaLa SUCKS! That place just get further
and further away from anything useful for me and they still owe me
several CDs. I have 350 CDs on my want list and nothing for months.

I'm in this same boat. When I hit equalibrium on there I'm out!

Looks like SwapaCD updated their page today. Sweet! Database is updated, too.

I just tried to update my lala have list with some new cds I just
bought and I cannot even figure out how to find the albums anymore.
When I finally did find a cd, all it will let me do is "purchase" it.
VERY user-unfriendly IMO.

Tall Tyrion wrote:

I just tried to update my lala have list with some new cds I just
bought and I cannot even figure out how to find the albums anymore.
When I finally did find a cd, all it will let me do is "purchase" it.
VERY user-unfriendly IMO.

It's definitely retarded. What happens is you see some blurb where the last line say something about seeing the band's discography or something. Click the link, then it comes up to a page to buy MP3s! Haha. You have to then click a link that says something about trading options, or whatever.

They screwed up the store, too. It's no longer a link. Now you go to your want list and click the Buy link. Then it brings up all the CDs you can buy, but it starts with the highest price ($30 plus). There's no way to sort by cheapest, so you have to go page by page (about 40 of them, at least for me) until the cheapest discs come up. They have some great deals. I just order Vain City Chronicles ($3.99), by The Crest, and Nosferatu ($7.09), by Helstar. So the store is a good thing, no matter how garish the site is.

It's also a pain to remove CDs from your wants if you try to do it from the page that lists the CDs. Nothing like it used to be where you'd just click Have or Want. Now, go to your Want list, the search for the band name and it searches your wants. Not a band change, but lala informs NO ONE of they do and don't change. Their customer service are horrendous. They change the entire layout and structure of the site, and tell no one how to use it. Haha.

As bad as it is, though, I'll stay. It can't hurt. SwapaCD blows it away, though. That site is well worth getting used to, if you can handle the slower pace.

The new LaLa site SUCKS!!! They really screwed it up bad. I see nothing but complaints on the feedback forum and rightfully so.

It's awful. I don't even like going there, and I'm still owed 7-8 CDs!

ultmetal wrote:

The new LaLa site SUCKS!!! They really screwed it up bad. I see nothing but complaints on the feedback forum and rightfully so.

Well, that's no different than before. Those on the forum do nothing but complain. This time, however, they're more justified in their complaints.

I couldn't even get to the forums. The links are extremely convoluted. I clicked a few times and then gave up.

I suppose it can't hurt to leave my account open, but I unless they redesign it, there's no point in going there for me any more.

The people working for lala have good ideas, but they have no design sense. They think it's cool that you have to click twelve links to get somewhere. It's ridiculous. The past updates haven't been bad; they were just so drastically different from the previous layout that it was confusing. This update, however, is just bad.

I've been going there for two years and now I don't even know how to add a want!!!!!!!!!!!
They can't be serious?? How is that update better??