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Music Section Changes + BRR Remoderation + 72hoSPC #7 (+ Ultra)

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Sorry, I'm late for the party. I'll try to make my essay oriented towards searchability, as an user, as a music porter, and as a person who more or less acknowledges how mySQL databases and website servers are handled.

I learned technology happens to allow us a number of things when it comes to data manipulation. Since Counterfeit's and Sinc-x' ideas about giving a standardized title, I'll try elaborating on it.

When I perform a search in the music section, I usually go by tag, name of game, number of downloads, and overall quality. One thing I appreciate already, is all the game's names are formatted in a perfect, organized manner, that's scrutinized both by regular users and moderators. I got called out on this topic, in a comment, when my submission neglected it, once.


So naturally, a "game's name" field could be implemented very quick. Stays the problem of less-known games, original tracks and such. If a script runs once to separate the titles, it will be in need of human check, that's for sure. But thanks to the way things are kept clean already, effort is limited. What I mean, is when I sort the 80+ pages of music content alphabetically, I'm rarely lost.

Now, speaking about Soundtracks, it is a bit tricky. I did not download them too much because, as mentioned by fellow users, I don't want to own a big, unused .zip file on my computer. I like seeing and reviewing them in the .spc player, though. But yeah, ultimately, I do seem more interested about a track that's singled out (when exists), than its counterpart that's bundled in a soundtrack. Therefore, in my opinion, even if the ease of upload is a definite benefit, having users avoid soundtrack files defeats the purpose of making them public: letting them gain in popularity and in use.
As a porter, I also want to ask what happens of the submissions that contain different versions (with echo, without echo, with @3, with @6, etc.), I've seen these variations and figure it is good as it when they come bundled. Surprisingly enough, this practice does not occur in sampled vs. unsampled versions submitted by the same user at the same time, my deduction is that that one is off-limits and follows the none/light/many classification instead.

Now, let me come back to the concept of searchability. I've been proposing complaining lately that the database could offer more to the website. So I'll illustrate this idea here, hoping that the current limitations are indeed technical and not ideological. In the screenshot below, we see some fields cannot be sorted. I believe, offering more sorting options could be a nice thing to have in order to compare songs' potential. But here in music, I'd only argue an author sort is interesting, over the other four.


To finish, I think offering a .csv download after a research (or even regarding the complete list); could be of use. I don't know, maybe actually preparing the .csv for multiple users at the same time would cause server slowdown. The .csv would contain all the fields without the cropped descriptions, with all the urls leading the the individual file page. The .csv batches can be run by python, so far as I know, and the "download .csv" link would be a button located at the bottom of the page. Of course, no need to record every .csv requested by every user. Once donwload is done, the file doesn't stay on the server. The reason why I like .csv, is they're light and can be open as a table on Microsoft Excel (or any other table manager). I happen to have an appeal for organized tables. I heavily rely on the sorting and filtering options of Excel, in my dayjob. In fact, I easily imagine myself keeping my favourite tracks organised in an Excel file. In fact I do it already but it's a gruesome task I can't seem to automatize any better. Since I have to listen the music and copy/paste all the relevant info.

And then there are my other ideas of letting users rate a song without having to comment them; updating the tag policy; holding official and serious discussion events between requesters (demand) and porters (offer), punlish actual use statistic reports, but I'm not too strong on them and I deviated from the soundtrack topic already, so I'll only develop if asked to.

That's it for me, I hope it was structured enough and useful. I do not say it enough, so thanks a lot for keeping things active on here.
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