Racks and Tags blog

Today we switched the website to new, cooler design. As if it was not enough trouble, we decided to change the name as well. We believe the new name is easier to remember and it better represents the purpose of the website - catalog all your music, regardless of the media it’s on, and even regardless of how thick is the layer of dust on it (in case you haven’t listen to some albums for months.)

So, welcome to Racks and Tags.

Besides the name and design change, there’s a number of smaller changes here and there:

• There are new user profile fields - feel free to add info about yourself. It’s entirely optional of course.
• Now you can actually upload your photo or avatar, and it will be displayed on your collection page.
• Front page has got a recent updates display. Whenever you add something new to your collection, link to it pops up on the front page for other folks to see.
• Album pages display photos of users who own, rated, or play that album.
• Now you can search artists in your collection from any page, not just the artists page.
• User collection pages display recently added/rated/played album covers and ratings. Pretty neat.
• Friends page has also changed - instead of viewing friend updates one by one, you can see them all together, in one combined feed.

That’s all for today. Don’t forget to update your bookmarks, and have a great weekend.

In preparation for big update the website is being shut down. I expect the downtime will be between 2-6 hours.

Yesterday’s update introduced new features for fellow music collectors. As of now, user collection pages display lists of recently added, recently played, and recently rated albums. All of these are updated automatically when local database is synchronized with the server. Individual album pages display lists of other users who own, play or rate the album. In addition, there’s a new cool friends feature which allows choosing individual users who can view your collection. For everybody else, including guest visitors, your collection will be hidden. It’s a great way to make your online collection publishing more private and secure, so if you haven’t created your MyGenres.com account yet because of these concerns, nothing should stop you now.

In addition to new features, album and song list rendering performance has been dramatically improved. It may be not a big deal for most folks, but it should be immediately noticeable to users with huge collections. I know there are few collections with 20K+ albums uploaded, now you can actually browse these heavyweights with little or no performance lag.

We are now offering a complimentary FreeDB server for all OrangeCD Suite users. From now on, this will be a permanent unofficial FreeDB mirror and it will be updated with fresh data from the official server on regular basis.

To access our new FreeDB mirror via HTTP, paste the following URL in the “CD info download URL” box in View - Preferences, Internet tab:

http://freedb.mygenres.com/~cddb/cddb.cgi

Access via CDDB protocol is also available using the hostname freedb.mygenres.com and port 8880. (Note that HTTP access is still the recommended way to use FreeDB.)

If you are using a different FreeDB-aware application, you are also welcome to use the new mirror. Check with your software documenation on how to re-configure it to use a different FreeDB server.

Our database server experienced pretty serious performance problems over the last few days. We are investigating the issue and making routine maintenance. Short periods of downtime are possible on Thusday 5/17 and Friday 5/18 nights.

Update 5/19: Diagnostics complete, performance issues fixed. The website is operating normally.

I have just added a search box for artists. It looks like a gray box on top of the artists view, but it’s really a search box where you can click, type the artist name, and press Enter to go directly to the list of the artist’s albums and links. It’s faster and more convenient than scanning a huge list of artists. It’s a regular search box.

Oh wait. That’s not a regular search box.

You can type first few letters of artist name in the search box, and in few moments, another box will appear underneath, displaying the list of possible artist matches. For example, if you typed ‘rad’, it will display Radiohead, Radio Massacre International, and all your artists with names starting from ‘rad’. All you have to do is select one match (either by pressing Up and Down keys on keyboard or using your mouse) and hit Enter. You can see a working example here.

Stay tuned for more cool features this coming weekend.

I received a few user complaints in past two weeks regarding error 507. The error was especially frequent to users with large music collections and, in worst cases, prevented them from using the website.

I have reasons to believe that the issue is resolved now with release of new OrangeCD 6.1.1. If you experienced any of the following symptoms, I recommend upgrading to version 6.1.1:

• 507 Invalid or expired session ID;
• Timeout error;
• 506 Another synchronization session is currently in progress.

The most recent version of OrangeCD Suite can be downloaded here. If the symptoms persist even after the upgrade, please shout because right now I am not aware of any reoccurences of the problem!

Other than that, I am busy preparing new features for public appearance. As you may see on the start page banner, MyGenres.com database passed 100,000 albums mark - of course these are not unique albums yet. Still, the number is big enough to allow me to draw conclusions about website demography and feature preference. (It is always hard to choose a feature to implement next, because so many possibilities exist. Knowing what users want helps a lot.)

Server software update is complete, and here’s the list of changes that occurred last night.

1. Classical albums display clickable composer link.
2. Compilation albums display clickable links for artists and composers of each song.
3. Privacy checkbox is supported. Albums that were marked “private” in OrangeCD Catalog are hidden from your collection website visitors. To see your private items on the website, you have to logon using your username and password.
4. Artist web links are uploaded to the server and displayed on artist page below the list of albums.

Due to nature of some changes, your albums may display inconsistent track listings until you synchronize your local database with new server software. To refresh track listings, and to see web links on artist pages, you have to synchronize your database once using Tools - Upload to Mygenres.com menu command in OrangeCD Catalog. 

And, speaking of synchronizing databases again, I would like to ask beta testers what are their opinions on current synchronization speed. Is it acceptable and tolerable on your Internet connection? Please comment.

In next 12 hours I will be adding next chunk of functionality to server software. Unfortunately, it means that the server will be unavailable most of the time while I am running scripts and debugging the data. I apologize for the inconvenience and hope that new changes will be worth the wait.

Database update is complete. As of this moment, all problems related to cover images should be resolved. (Except one relatively rare problem, see below.) To fix all covers in your collection, upgrade your client to OrangeCD Suite version 6.0.9 which was released few moments ago, then perform a synchronization. If everything goes as I expect, album cover images will re-appear on your pages.

And here is one remaining problem that I mentioned.

Due to bug in the old client, in some cases your albums may display an image that is different from what you see in local database. Typically, it displays a cover of another edition or reissue of the same album, and sometimes, the image has different brightness or hue. It can only happen to the albums or covers downloaded from Amazon in specific builds of OrangeCD Catalog. If it happens to some of your albums, there is a simple way to fix it. Re-download the image using Download CD Covers menu command, then perform a usual server synchronization, and the correct cover image will appear on server.

There is another, more radical way to fix all covers at once, but I prefer not to post it here because it will only work for short period of time. So, if you have many albums in your collection that you want to correct, contact me at webmaster@mygenres.com and I will send you simple instructions.