Fall is here - time to collaborate on some music!

Hey there, friends of wikiloops!

We are once again witnessing the annual homecoming of the northern hemispheres musicians
to their home studios - here is to a creative fall season 2023 on wikiloops!

A quick recap of what we have been up to in the wikiloops engine room

Since my last blog entry, we had that big wikiloops update in May, which took some post-rollout attention - I'd say the amount of bugs to fix was small considering the amount of changed back-end code,
but I would also like to give thanks to those community members who pointed out some issues.
Thanks for your collaboration on the platforms functionality, that's one of the good ingredients to wikiloops!

In July, I have been able to finish the new wikiloops backing track search engine, featuring a new design of the search filters,
and offering the additional "scope" filters. The latter are allowing you to dig for different types of tracks with some pre-configured filters.
To me, the major benefit of these "scopes" is that they do give a much better overview of what types of tracks wikiloops has in store.
To classify our track collection into "drums only", "small line-ups" and "full-house-backings" is a great way to dive in and find the track suiting your needs.
I have been thinking about how to design a backing track search engine which delivers the desired tracks to any type of musician, be it vocalist or instrumentalist - and I have been thinking about that for a long time now - and it comes down to two issues:
Since we do not do cover versions on wikiloops, people have a hard time finding any titles that seem familiar, so one needs to lead them to their track discovery by other means,
and second, people have so totally different ideas of what a good backing track needs to be, one really is well advised to let people define their own ideal track first. The "scopes" do just that. Hope it works for you :)

I do feel quite positive about the new design (especially when looking back at screenshots of the previous version), and even my friend karuma seemed a little impressed (which is rare, trust me).

Thanks to more pointers from the community, I have continued on the search feature some more, improving the text search capabilities lately.
Feel free to give me more feedback on the search feature via the comments below!

In August & September we put some focus on what you might call the outskirts of wikiloops - as some may have already noticed, the remix notifications going out by email have received a nice facelift,
and the whole sign-up-for-a-new-account and upgrade-to-supporting-member procedure was re-designed as well. Not the most musical pages on wikiloops, but well worth improving.

Happy Homecoming to wikiloops, everybody!

As summer is coming to an end on the northern half of the globe, we are seeing new member registrations on the rise, plus people coming back to wikiloops,
so we are looking forward to a bustling fall season on the 'loops.

Before I'll end, let me thank those of you who chose to support the wikiloops project.
None of the above would be happening without you, the folks who are willing to chip in a few bucks a month to keep the project afloat.

Thanks to all who help make it happen!


Traditional "stats of the day" on october 1st 2023:
221,375 public tracks online
73,448 total members