Today there were some changes made to the site. The results were of small consequence to the users of the site but they involved some major changes behind the scenes so that always makes me a little nervous when they are introduced. They have been tested but you never know. If you “pink screen” please let us know using the admin contact info at the bottom of every page on the site.

Search

We are now using a different method entirely for searching through the site. We now look at very small snippets, not whole words. Hopefully folks will find this more useful.

‘Type’ on Add Files

This only affects artists: You can now select a ‘type’ when adding files to a record. When you pick one of these types, special tags are automatically added to your upload’s record. So if you uploaded a MIDI file as your main file, when you Add an mp3 file to that record you can select ‘Preview’ as a type to let everyone know. ‘Type’ is editable in ‘Manage Files’

If you add a ‘Sample’ type to your record, you still have to use ‘Edit Properties’ on the main upload to add the instrument type for that sample. (sorry about that and sorry if that’s confusing, we’re still working this stuff out… and example of how to use the new system is here.)

More ‘in your face’ Manage Files

This only affects artists: There is a new ‘Manage Files’ menu item and a link to it from ‘Submit Files’ that takes you to a new page that lists all your uploads with action buttons. This and the item above were done in response to this thread. I think this should eliminate the previously common (understandable) excuse that you didn’t know you could ‘replace’ or ‘add’ files to records.

Bug Fix: License Tag

It seems that when you edited the properties for an upload you would lose the license tag for that upload. This did not affect the license logos or links associated with the upload, however it returned bogus results when browsing the site by tags (including samples and pells). I have restored (I hope) all the tags now.

This was OLD bug, probably dates back to Feburary so if you’ve been digging for samples and pells by license you want to do it again (!) - there were over 1,500 upload records affected by this bug.

Browser Compat

There have been some layout improvements in some of the more complex screens (like the ‘info’ popup) that should make the information in those a little more easy to comprehend.

IE6 compatibility is probably a thing of the past. We’ve looked pretty lousy on it for a while and we will no longer even be testing on it (which means you’re probably not going to enjoy the site if you are one of the 100 odd folks who visit us daily still on that browser)

Firefox 3 Beta has been available for a while and if you are reading this then you probably are not using it because much of the site is broken, especially pages that use heavy javascripting (playlists, remix browser, etc.). I’ve taken a mild run at trying to diagnose it, hoping that it’s something wrong in the beta that they will fix but it’s looking more like it’s on our end. I will be looking at this very soon since they are in Release Candidate mode as I write this.


Peace,
VS