Support for albums by various artists

We added support for albums with tracks by various artists, such as compilations and soundtracks, so now we can approve and publish that kind of albums. Sorry for have taking so long to implement such important feature, but it was more difficult that I thought.

Cheers !

Important changes and new features

As you may have noticed, a few days ago we rolled out a new version of the website, with many changes and some new features. This kept us busy during the past couple of months, from now on you can expect more features being added regularly as before, and many small changes while we finish to polish the new layout.

As usual, any opinions and feedback are welcome, feel free to comment on this post.

Browse albums by subgenres

The navigation of albums by genre (rock, pop, electronica, etc) was too broad, and its utility limited with many albums often spanning many genres.

Now, you have available the grouping of albums by subgenre, descending of genres and providing a much more narrow and useful classification.

For example, now you have subgenres like industrial, grunge, punk, britpop inside "alternative rock"; disco, house, trip-hop, ambient, big beat inside "dance & electronica," and so on.

When browsing albums by genre, you'll see in the right a list of its subgenres. Click on any of it to narrow down the list of albums to those belonging to that classification.

Clicking in "All genres and subgenres" or in "Genres" in the top navigation bar will take you to a page with a full list of all genres and subgenres.

Also, in the album and artist details pages, now we show in the right the list of genres and subgenres where that album or artist belongs. You can click on them to see more albums in the same genre or subgenre, being a useful resource to discover new music you might like.

New layout

The most noticeable change is the new distribution of the page elements. We moved the navigation options from the right to a new navigation bar on the top, with some options in drop down menus identified by the arrow icon.

We do so in order to gain space in the right bar. The previous design was too tight and we no longer had space to allocate new features and show more information about the contents.

Ads

Well, we're not happy about putting ads in Coda, but as we continue growing, so are our costs, and I can't continue affording them from my pocket. If they work well enough, maybe I can work full-time in Coda and build all the new features we want to continue improving.

Sadly, it's hard to find an advertising network willing to work with torrent sites that pays well. We could use some advise about this, if you know a good network or represent one interested in work with Coda, please contact us.

Other changes

• Displayed more information about the uploaders in album and artist detail pages.
• Login box available in all pages, for easier and faster access.
• "Share this" box in all pages, to share contents in social networks.
• Redesigned footer, showing our partnerships and highlighting community features.
• More noticeable links to our RSS feeds.
• Many small design improvements.

Legal issues with Amazon.com

As far as I know, we are the first and only music torrents site that provides you the option to buy the albums we have published in Amazon.

I thought that this was an excellent idea, give the user the option to easily buy an album that they liked after download and hear it for free. That way, everybody wins: the user gets an album that already know they like, the artists and Amazon gets some money (oh, and the labels too, most of it), and we get a small commission that help us to cover our hosting expenses. A great idea that every torrent site should implement.

A couple of days ago, we received an email from Amazon, demanding us to remove any links to them and informing that they closed our account.

I can't overstate enough the idiocy of said request: they're actually telling us to stop helping them selling albums! This is so unbelievable that I needed to share it, and vent the frustration that caused me this failure in trying to cooperate with them for the best interests of everyone.

I created Coda.fm with the objective of innovate and go where no other torrent site has gone before, and this "partnership" was a key piece of our vision, but looks like they're not ready. This is a big disappointment and a bad decision that stopped a first attempt to integrate our activities, in my opinion only opposing in appearance.

Although we're no longer an Amazon Associate, we're going to keep the links to buy the albums. A couple of hundred of albums and digital downloads has been sold to the date, proving it's usefulness, and that is the only criteria I will use to decide what features we keep or remove.

Don't worry, as long as someone find us useful, not matter what happens, we will adapt (and fight) to keep Coda.fm running.

Cheers!


Coda.fm administrator

User profile

We just added the possibility of customize your user page, being able to create a user profile to tell the others more about yourself, if you want to do so. In the future, we plan to add social network features (like connect with other users, create list of favorites artists, have a custom RSS feed, etc.), and being able to describe yourself should be the first step in that direction.

This was a frequently requested feature, and I hope you all find it useful.

Cheers !

Coda.fm administrator

Weekly rankings

We have completed the weekly rankings (by number of downloads) of albums and artists, in contrast to the old rankings based on total downloads. The new rankings should be more informative, showing you the latest trends, and the lists will be more dynamic, worth of checking it out often.

Also, we kept the rankings based on total downloads, so you can look at it too if you find it interesting.

I hope you all find this new feature useful.

Cheers !

Upcoming features for April, 2009

Hi everyone,

Has been a while since the last blog post, so it's time to keep you updated about the present and future of Coda. In the past couple of weeks we where busy optimizing our code and server configuration to be able to cope with the increasing traffic; this efforts resulted in better response times (it should be noticeable) and buy us more time before being forced to upgrade our hardware.

Now we are free to continue adding more features, and you should expect those listed below to be ready before May.

Weekly rankings

Currently, the ranking of popularity of albums and artists are based on the total download count of albums, and this ended in increasingly stagnant rankings. The implementation of a weekly ranking should result in more dynamic and useful rankings, showing the latest trends.

We are going to keep the ranking based in totals too, so you can choose what interest you most.

Extended rankings lists

Speaking of rankings, we are going to offer longer lists (in addition to the current lists) to be able to see more items ranked below the current limit.

User profile

We are going to add you the possibility of customize your user page, being able to create a user profile and tell more about you (if you want to). Not a very useful feature by itself, but we plan to add in the future social-network like features (like connecting with other users, list your favorite artists, etc) and being able to describe yourself should be the first step in that direction.

Support for albums by various artists

Surely you have noticed that currently they aren't any albums by various artist available in Coda, or that your submitted torrents of albums by VA (usually soundtracks and compilations) aren't being approved.

This is a current limitation of the platform, and we plan to fix it soon. If you have affected torrents waiting for approval, don't delete them, those will we published, eventually.

Stay tuned, we're going to announce and explain the new features as being deployed in this blog.

Cheers !

The Coda.fm administrator

Content rating tool

As you may have noticed, we already finished and deployed the content rating tool, a new feature that allows you to report the quality of a torrent and the information about the album in his page, and view the reports of others users.

You can report that a torrent is perfectly fine, or if have some kind of common issues that could affect a torrent or our metadata about the album. The most severe issues reported (as fakes, or unplayable files) will raise an alert to our moderators for immediate action.

This feature is available in the new tab "Quality reports", in every album page.

The development of this feature took a while because we have to build the tools needed for the moderators to edit the contents (that where "create and read only" before) for fixing the reported issues that may have arise. Expect that the new features announced to be in development (in a upcoming post) will take a lot less of development time.

However, I'm not entirely satisfied with the descriptive texts in the page of this new feature, if you found it confusing or you have a suggestion for a better version (even for the name of the feature itself) feel free to tell us so in the comments of this post.

Cheers !

Artist picture zoom

We have a tiny new feature: zoom for the artist picture.
It works just like the zoom on the album covers, just click on the artist picture (in the artist details page) to see it at full size.
Not very useful, but fun, and was easy to implement because it uses the same code as the album zoom feature.

Cheers !

Content rating and moderation tools, phase 1 of 2 ready

As we told you in a previous post, we were working on providing to our moderators the tools they needed for edit and delete all the kinds of contents, as opposed to only be able to accept or reject a set of metadata for an album or artist, that was the only thing they we're able to do until today, when we finished and deployed this functionality.

Now that they have the required backends to fix any errors, mismatches or missing data about the albums and artists, we're going to start with the frontend side, that is, the tools that will allow you, the user, to see and report the quality of the torrents and flag metadata errors.
This new stage should take less time than the backend one, it should be ready in less that two weeks.

This was a tedious but indispensable thing to do to keep our promise of always deliver contents of quality, and we hope to finish it as soon as possible to continue building more fun and useful features for the users.

Cheers...

Search auto-complete

Hi !

We have a small but very cool and useful feature, an auto-complete function that works over the search field and suggest the firsts most likely results, grouped by artists and albums.

There is a screenshot:


You can click on one of the suggestions or select one moving with the arrow keys and then pressing enter, doing that will jump you directly to the selected album or artist page. If you don't select anything and press enter, you will do a full search, just like before.

We think that will help you to speed the search of common contents, getting results faster and jumping directly to your wanted content, without passing for the search results page. Also, it's fun and pretty.

As always with a new feature, could have some bug, if you find one please report it in feedback forum or as a comment in this post.

The next big feature could take a while, so we wanted to give you before some other minor but cool and useful feature to enjoy in the meantime.

Cheers !