Hello everyone,
Several new exciting features were added:
- Advanced Search form on "Styles" page (see below)
- Improved quick search relevance. Exact matches should rank higher while inexact matches should be more permissive to allow misspellings, etc
- If no search results were found it will suggest to request a style on the forum
- Time signature and BPM are displayed next to styles
- Style reviews were added and integrated with the forum. You can quickly add reviews right from the "Styles" page as you preview them. Each time you try a style please consider rating and reviewing it to help separate high quality from low quality styles. If this starts spamming the forum too much we can remove reviews from the forum's home page.
- When hovering over someone's avatar on the form their keyboards will be shown (you can specify this under "My Profile" on the main site). This should help with error reporting and style reviews.
- When suggesting songs (or during style uploads) existing songs and artists are now marked to encourage selecting existing entries and not breeding differently spelled duplicates.
Advanced Search
The feature that took the longest was the search overhaul. You can find the new "Advanced Search" form on the "Styles" page. It might look a bit overwhelming at first, but it is there for when you feel you can't find what you are looking for and willing to craft more intricate filtering. It allows you to perform a few interesting searches that were not possible before:
- You can search for styles with the exact compatibility level for a given keyboard (when you select a keyboard during a quick filtering it shows you all styles with Partial or higher compatibility, now you can fine tune this)
- Before we had "style origin" toggle between factory/user styles. The biggest problem with this was that converted factory styles were listed as user styles. Now there are 3 options: "Factory" (unmodified factory styles), "Factory Adaptations" (user styles that are based on Factory styles), and "User Styles" (includes only custom user styles without factory adaptations). This separation relies on factory styles and their conversions being properly grouped under "Adaptations" on the site, which is currently not always the case. We will work on improving the adaptations grouping in the next builds.
- You can filter styles based on BPM and Time Signatures
- You can filter for styles that have or don't have adaptations for specific keyboards, which makes it possible to run interesting searches as "give me Genos2 factory styles that are not present on Genos1" (you would specify compatibility=[Genos2 Factory] and adaptations=[excludes][Genos Factory])
- You can search for styles that use specific voices (inside OTS or style sections), which can be used as poor man's voice catalogue. For example you like a specific voice but not sure what are good effects or companion voices for it. You can now search for factory styles on your keyboards that use this voice in OTS (or search user styles) to see how it could sound. A proper voice archive will be coming eventually, this is just a quick taste based on the information we already have about each style.
The next large milestone will be community self moderation tools that would let you edit pretty much anything on this site. This is one of the essential features that I always wanted to have on this site and the last missing puzzle piece before we can move to exploring new exciting areas.
As always if you notice any issues on the site or have feature requests please don't hesitate to bring them up.
Thank you!