Hey all,

So we could use some help in beta testing the new Stems Browser (!)

This is going to replace the ‘Samples’ tab here at ccMixter so make sure to let us know if you find bugs or if it’s missing that awesome feature you’ve always wanted to see there.

Thanks,
Victor

I love that clicking the tag immediately returns the result, but shouldn’t it:
(a) only show the tags that are in the first search result so that clicking another tag doesn’t return “wups - no matches”? This is on the principle that a program should not offer an option that produces an error.
(b) show tags that are in the search result. Clicking these expands the list to add samples with that tag too.
(I prefer b for creative searching)

Could we switch between modes, Most Popular Tags, Find Tag (as now) and Most Recommended Samples. Together with (b) this should give some creative inspiration.

A Pot Luck button which could look at todays date and choose a range based on the month (so its seasonal looking two weeks ahead to give time to remix), sorted by the most recommended and least remixed, then pick 5 (I would suggest a Poisson distribution λ=4).

BPM is very important to me, however I don’t like the current slicing into groups of 0 to 5 and 5 to 10, since I already have a BPM in mind and I am browsing for something close on either side. I would like to enter a BPM and to get back a sorted list of the nearest BPM that match my search criteria. i.e. my tune is going to be 60 BPM, I would want the list to be sorted with nearest to 60 first and including BPM both above and below the target up to 10 BPM either side.

When I click the Title I would like a popup/side window of the Description section of the sample. Tags should be included (See b). Most samples include some hints about what the sample was intended for.

I would also like to filter by ccPlus. If I am writing a tune I would like to know if it can be sold under the ccPlus agreement.

When I click a sample I would also like to see remixes that used that sample, since they in turn may include associated samples that I can use. i.e. I click a bass loop, another remixer may have added guitar and pads that I could use too.

Looks nice and clear. Glad you filtered out all the infrequently used tags too.
Love that Flash is no longer needed so it can be used on a Pad.
Formatting goes wrong on a small screen, such as an iPad, the cells overlap.
Next page buttons disappeared when a tag with a large number of samples was clicked. i.e I clicked a tag with 12 samples, 10 were shown per page, there was no forwards/back page keys so two could not be accessed.

The new designs of dig and stems look very good - on a very big screen (what is most likely what you use to develop). But on a laptop with lower resolution there is this annoying necessary vertical scrolling all the time. Lots of space is wasted vertically while the information can only be found with scrolling up and down.

You decided not to list all tags in the tag list … hmm, well, there is still the general search field for exotic instruments that are no longer listed as tag. But it would be cool for the search to allow a “+” sign to narrow down the result (key1 AND key2) instead of just searching for any (key1 OR key2) of the search keys.

Not really a bug report. Just wanted to say I like it! individual sample streaming is a huge … this is kind of off topic, but is there an add-on or something I can install on my pc browser to stream Flac files? They are the bane of my online existence :P

There is so much I love about this new Stems Site! I especially love how the zip file contents are revealed, the FLAC files identified, and individual sample previewing. Searching by tag is also super slick. Great work Victor!!!

Just so everyone knows: I am monitoring this thread judiciously in between marathon coding sessions and fending off DOS-style attacks on our sites

I’m hearing from a couple of folks that traversing the tree, specifically for samples, is something people actually do - if you’re one of those people and haven’t spoken up here please do so!

Works great so far, but here are some ideas:

- The audio player could use a volume slider

- The “filters” button is a bit difficult to find. Users shouldn’t need to click on it—it should already be open. Also, I would place it underneath the tag box.

- The option to display multiple results per page should be beside the “next page” button, not in the filters. The “next page” button could also be placed on the bottom to avoid having to scroll up after every page. I think the general layout can be improved, check out how these sites do it:

http://www.audionetwork.com...

http://audiojungle.net/sear...

- I would change the font colour of titles to black—and perhaps bold them. The grey colour makes them difficult to scan at fast speeds.

- It’s kind of hard to see the bpm information on the right. Maybe place that information in the grey area of each file, next to the file format icon, or next to the titles. Also, would it be difficult to display the duration and perhaps upload date of each track (not the stems, just the mixed-down version)? It might make searching easier.

Anyway, the browser is already pretty easy to use, so kudos on that. Hope this helps!

So I’ve made an update to the beta site - trying to incorporate as much of the feedback as time would allow.

There is still a ways to go but I have to take a break from messing with features and layout to focus on the bugs and performance issues that I’ve introduced with this update (there are many)

Oh wow this is so much better! Great work. I can’t wait to see what happens with the rest of ccMixter’s rewrite. :)

is it offline, now? I can’t access it. I’m not in US, maybe that’s why?

I was going to take a shot at remixing Blue Wave Theory (Hayburner) since one of the interesting things about their uploaded samples is the fact that they seem to have made pretty much every raw studio track available - and there’s a lot of them - quite typical for a traditional live recording project.

However there are two things that seem to be a bit of a pain in the neck when dealing with lots of individual files:

(1) Unless I missed something, it seems that in the new stems browser one has to click every file download button separately and then another download button in a popup. That’s two clicks per file and in the case of the stems pack from Blue Wave Theory, that would end up being somewhere around 80 clicks for around 40 files. In the old stems browser, I was always using a Firefox browser extension called “DownThemAll” which would allow me to download all the media files on a page in just a few clicks. So that was just fine. However in the new stems browser, that Extension doesn’t seem to work anymore, making the process quite a pain in the butt.

(2) In both, old and new stems browsers, the FLAC filenames are just sequence numbered and after having downloaded them all, and imported them into one’s DAW, there’s no hint of what each stem contains. So I ended up having to rename every FLAC file (and one mp3 file) - about 40 file renames in total - in the operating system, and then the import into my DAW had sensible track names. And that was a real pain in the neck and I might not want to ever do that again unless I have extra spare time and a rather patient disposition that day. :-)

All of this becoming more of an issue, seems to be an unintended consequence of using FLAC files, since in the very old days, ZIP files would be much more utilized for mass uploads of tracks. But FLAC files are often too big to be put into ZIP files (more than 1 per file) without the resulting ZIP file being over the upload file size limit. And that’s also a pain in the neck for uploaders, since they have to do so many more uploads. It definitely has discouraged me from uploading FLAC files before.

Hi Victor

Is it just me or are the new browsers not working at the mo, they used to work fine for me but seem to have disappeared recently. Just get a “loading” circle that goes on for ever

Cheers Simon (urmymuse)