Topic: Features & Improvements

Winter is coming ... as the nights get longer I'll have a little more time to work on the website.

What comes to your mind when it comes to features and improvements? Are there things you miss, things that annoy you that should be fixed, things that you never use at all and could easily live without?

You've pretty much made tweaks and improvements to all my musings as they've gone along in recent months (e.g. the more 'personalised' recommendations via the top bar / polls). For that I thank you!

There's stuff I don't use, such as the wishlist etc., but I'm sure these would add value for other users so I don't think there's anything to say to get rid of!

^ Thanks! Definitely not getting rid of the wishlist ;-)

I think that assigning ratings and tags needs to become easier, that is going to be a big focus point for me. Not sure how yet, but currently it takes too many clicks to assign tags and subgenres.

Oh for sure, that's definitely just a case of how I use the site and listen to music, it's clearly a good feature! My 'wishlist' I guess is just more of an offline play queue I suppose.

Tricky one with the tags, I suppose the balance is between the level of detail and the number of clicks. I think its fine how it is now, but I appreciate I'm not a hugely tech-minded user so don't have a lot of sensitivity to it.

Currently, in order to assign a sub genre to a release, you need to:

• click on the status
• in the dropdown, select "launch info editor"
• if you have not selected the proper genre, click the main genre and select the desired level
• find the sub genre section in the large dialog window
• click "add"
• find the sub genre, click it
• in the dropdown, select the desired level

That's just too much. :-)

at least for defining the sub genre a level is not essential imho, maybe even when going further to Modifiers and Styles.

I'm not sure about the purpose anyway, have regarded this more as a proportion weighting in case of multi selections, not a quality level

^ Of course the level in the tag assignments is not a rating - if it was then it would be displayed with the rating colors.

No, the tag level is there for you to indicate how strongly the tag applies to the music. By assigning a tag with a level less than 6 you can indicate a minor influence, for example. And when you are assigning multiple tags of the same category you can express a ranking.

And of course you can assign tags with level 0 to indicate that the music does not exhibit that trait at all. Useful for when someone else assigns the wrong (in your opinion) tags.

Since there is a link to PA, is it possible that there could also be links to MMA and JMA? Possibly, Discogs too?

^ Sure! The main problem is that these links cannot be established automatically - it's a time-consuming process to edit them.

I’ve been trying to add the missing links to the albums that I add or I listen to as I go. I don’t always remember but I figure every little bit helps.

Another thought for a genre tax under rock is to add "soft rock". I figure since hard rock is there, we might want to be able some bands as soft rock. i.e. the Doobie Brothers album that I am currently listening to. LOL

^ I have been thinking about how to make the whole system of tagging easier. Adding a genre like "Soft Rock" would go against what I initially had in mind with the separate stylistic tags, for instance there is already the "Soft" tag in moods which one could combine with "Rock". On the other hand I appreciate the simplicity for someone to just select something like "Soft Rock" from the sub-genre list, and of course as you said we already have "Hard Rock" as a sub genre and "Soft Rock" exists as a genre label:

https://rateyourmusic.com/genre/soft-rock/

I'll need to figure out how to unite both strategies. I have an idea :-)

Under instruments, there is a choice for bass (electric). Should there also be a choice for bass (acoustic)?

I see that Metal Music Archives is listed as a link, but it doesn't seem to work. I don't think you announced it as a What's New? yet, so I am thinking it might still be a work in process. When I tried adding a couple of times, I got a message that the "bandcamp" link had already been added. In cases where there wasn't a bandcamp link, I just got a "NetworkError when attempting to fetch resource" message, but it also references bandcamp.

MMA links are an old feature … might have been broken by recent changes. I’ll look into fixing them, and also add JMA support.

MMA links should work now, and JMA as well.

I know you dislike Encyclopedia Metallum, but I think they should be added a link option as well. They're more reliable than RYM for finding accurate information.

Mike wrote:

MMA links should work now, and JMA as well.

Thanks Mike!

I’m just mentioning this as a minor detail—it’s not really important—but I was assigning genres to the first ELP album and entered "Traces of Jazz," only to see it crossed out later, as if that weren't the case. Yet, there is a lot of jazz in the middle section of "Take a Pebble." I found that system error curious, which is why I brought it up.

Well, “Traces” means 20/100, which the display component renders that way. Will soon work on those, they are really old. Probably best to use some graphic visualisation rather than rely on text formatting …