New wikiloops version 14 open for preview

Will do Dick.
Give me 24 hours.
I only speak for myself but search is invaluable for retrieving from the deepest of vaults on the Loops. Sometimes only remember a word of a track I heard years ago.

I have a few tracks in mind to use. Will be back.

Thank you for the hard work.

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I actually had time now...
Okay so right off the bat:

Typed in the following words to tracks:

Narcissistic- Found track "Narcissistic Psychodynamic"
Psychodynamic- Found track "Narcissistic Psychodynamic"
Cry- Found "Cry" tracks but was looking for "I cry for you" Found it.
Ship- Looking for "When the ship goes down" , found all ship tracks and it was down the list but still found it.
Stigmata- Was looking for a track "Errata Stigmata". Found it and other Stigmata tracks.
Warranties- Found track "No Warrenties, No Returns" which was my goal.
Shallow- Looked up one of Wikiloops oddest tracks "Shallow Waters". Found it.

The track I mentioned "Are You Serious" seems to have disappeared from my former profile. It should not have as Piper did a remix. So I take if you leave the Loops only tracks with remixes remain however , if the remix person leaves the track disappears? Oh well...not. a huge deal but it isnt there so search didnt find it.

Typed in Stef- Found a whole page of Stef.
Typed "Olivbee" , found a whole page of Olive.

I would say it appears working and more accurate. Of course it wont accommodate misspellings but that's okay. People need to be more precise with grammer.

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Thanks for the detailed testing, that looks like matters are indeed improved!
There is a bit of "fuzzy" search implemented there now, which does cover slight typos, I tested "mradamondrms" last night and it found me matches despite the missing "u", but that does not seem to cover all types of typos - still tweaking on that.
Another major issue I see is the behaviour when text searching for terms which are a wikiloops category, such as "drums" or "blues".
The results one gets do not match the expectations, that worked better before (still does on the live version, mind, we are testing & discussing the test domains version here!). I'll keep tweaking... thanks again for your support!

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Overall much more confident using it now. Thank you!


I DID NOT test "tracks with drums and bass" or "drums only"...etc..

Also Search above chat did well. Typing "Stef" brought me right to Stefs profile.
Typing "Ship" brings me to exact same results as using top menu search.

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Am I the only one who finds the profile picture scaling an issue. Especially if your new to Wiki. I have yet to find any recommended sizes or formats for the three spaces for profile pics. The space at the bottom left, the one that appears on comments is very annoying to to get any degree of optimization. They seem to be very over compressed. Any improvement and or help would be welcome to Wikiers. I think the profiles should look as good as the music sounds.


Rick:)

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You always look optimized handsome Rick.

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Sounds like there is something I must be missing, could you pretty please provide a screenshot of what exactly you mean with "the space at the bottom left" ? Sorry, I'd really apreciate it, might be something I just don't get to see in the browsers I'm mostly using, all looks pretty dandy in firefox to me.

Then: regarding the suggested sizes of the profile banners / avatar image:
The latest version of the "edit your profile" page offers that new "crop your image to the correct dimensions"-tool (see attached image). The selected area (surrounded by that blue line) has the correct dimensions to cut the ideal aspect ratio, so you really do not need to know that before uploading.
If the image you are uploading is too small, it might be stretched to fit, or you would need to zoom in on it, making it pixelish, so, the best bet is to pick a large image, feed it into that cropper tool and let that cut & downsize the image if need be...
at least that is how that is supposed to work, now you tell me where it does not so I can work it out :)

p.s.
still tweaking on the text search, ran into some issues last night ... work in progress.

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Dick attached the following image:

Hmmmm... still... I see three things here that could be improved:

#1
Even though the new crop tool gives users the chance to upload images with different sizes we should mention the minimum, the maximum and the recommended image dimensions to the user. The last one simply for giving users the chance to upload their images in the highest possible quality (without any up- or downscaling)

#2
The crop tool allows to set a crop rectangle that's outside(!) of the image bounds. That leads to profile/banner images that do not fill the bounds of the container completely and that in turn looks a bit ugly ;)

#3
After an image was uploaded the message "upload finished" appears but the user does not have an option to upload another image or to the delete the uploaded image. A page refresh is required to upload a new image. And an option to delete any image would also be nice.

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Help yourself, nobody is anywhere near fixing some shizzle then you is, sir :P

No, seriously, valid points, and I also noticed the facebook-preview images of liks to tracks are making use of the avatar and banner images, which also complicates choosing a suitable image. I'll sort the matter.


Now, back to LittleWings search issue: My updated version has gone live a few days ago and I still observe its behaviour a little. The "drums bass guitar" results still don't make me happy, but the type of "i remember some title" searches you were struggling with are much improved indeed, also the sorting of results now works as one would expect.

On to zedders findings on the radio page - I looked into that and fixed the wrong instrument declarations displayed there, thanks for the hint, that bug was not all obvious at first sight. I also let the radio shuffle its playlist, so you wont start with the same song anytime you tune in, that had gone overboard somehow. I am yet to look into how often these playlists are re-assembled to include more variety, I did like the mix and quality I came across tho.

I just rolled out another minor update including a lot of code cleanup hours done by karuma (hence my humorous comment at the beginning).

Thanks for all of your support!

p.s.
attached, this is what we've been thru code wise in the past year.

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Dick attached the following image:

Thanks for sorting out the radio Dick! I know it's a small corner but since May I haven't had time to pick up my guitar let alone record anything but I DO listen to the latest jams to see what everyone's been doing. Roll on winter and I'll have finished rebuilding the inside of my narrowboat home and start playing again. I had to make a rule - no playing - or I'd never have finished the building work. :)

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Works much better. Thank you, Dick.

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Hey Dick - back to the radio.
Oh how I wish you had left latest jams playing in reverse order from the actual latest. I can't imagine why you would randomise that one. It's now completely lost it's appeal for me, I'd rather it was as it was showing the wrong musicians than this.

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grrrrr... I explicitly excluded the latest jams from shuffeling,
but obviously that didn't work as intended. Fixed it now, update is on the way.

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Woo-Hoo!
I'm pleased you can do that Dick, I think the other genres shuffling is a good idea. Do they update with more recent tracks or is that a manual job?

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That's not done manually, there is some extra-special-magic-sauce type of logic that assembles the radios lists based on some super secret logic. I will review that some time to see if more variety can be produced, that should be possible.

Now, back to Acousticeg's notion on the profile image editing flaws :
I have just delivered a smaller update to improve that, including the three things mentioned by karuma.
I added a much nicer looking default banner, too, in case someone notices that blue curtain, that was me ;)

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Hey Dick,

Heres another thing thats NOT critical at the moment but whenever you have time...

It concerns selecting instruments when you upload a remix:

1. Can you please fix the capitalization on "acoustic Guitar"

2. Used to be whenever you selected "Other Stringed", you could then type in and define what "other" was. i.e Select "Other stringed " and then type "Fretless bass" or "Guitar Synth".
Now it just stays "other" without option to manually type in description.


If that is not possible or desired, can we add the following to the instrument selection list:

Fretless Guitar

Fretless Bass

Guitar Synth

Ewie (I might have mispelled that but its an "other wind instrument", I.e. a digital woodwind instrument)

E Drums (This would be selected in order to seperate programmed drums versus Acoustic drum kits. Its respectful to "real" drummers. If I manually programmed drum midi patterns , I dont really feel right selecting "Drums" as I didnt play them. Sometimes I play an E kit which is really playing but drums assembled at a keyboard , feel like cheating.)


Just bringing that to your attention and its not urgent.

Also does the pirate flag easter egg still exist? Ive always thought the pirate flag was cool.

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I don't feel like I'm cheating when I draw midi drums, I can't think of a harder way to make a drum track!
I agree it shouldn't be lumped in with real drum playing though, it's not the same at all.

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took care of the two mentioned issues last night, thanks for the pointers. The "specify other instrument" option simply didn't appear on the display due to some bug, it should show up and work as it used to now.

I believe the pirate flag still exists, too, but that has always been available on individual request only :)

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Getting reports that the embedded player doesn't work for some people. The first time I tried the loop brackets were both set to the beginning. I closed FB then tried again and no more issues. Some people have tried different browsers and tell me that nothing works.

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