SoundUnwound Blog

Discovering Music Via The SoundUnwound Community

If you’ve ever headed straight for the CD rack when visiting a friend’s home for the first time, you’ll understand that one of the best ways to discover new music is by comparing someone else’s taste with your own, noticing gaps where you seem to agree, and listening to recommendations. That’s why we’ve introduced a few simple social features to the library section of the site: because other people’s listening choices can act like guides for shaping your own.

At the bottom of your library page there’s now a section called “Libraries similar to yours” (pictured above). As you’d expect, it shows you a snapshot of other SoundUnwound users’ libraries where there’s a significant overlap with your own, using a complex formula accounting for library sizes and scope. By clicking on the user's name you can view their library fully, and there you’ll see some more comparisons at the bottom of the page (pictured below): on the right hand side, more similar libraries to explore; and on the left, the gaps in your library where your tastes seem to overlap.

If you find someone particularly interesting, you can follow them using the blue button in the headline.

From your profile page, you’ll now be able to see a quick summary of their latest activity on the site: their most recent library addition, quiz score total, and edits.

To get involved in the new music community at SoundUnwound, you need to have a SoundUnwound library and have public viewing of it enabled from your settings page.

As always, we’re interested to know what you think of these new features, so if you have any comments or feedback, please let us know!

Ed @ SoundUnwound

Find, Listen And Remember

There’s so much music available nowadays it’s becoming difficult to sift through everything to find new music you really like. But we think our 30-second samples provide an opportunity to do that easily, by hearing the style of a release before deciding whether to investigate further. That’s why we’ve created the new library sample player, which is intended to give you the chance to listen to larger segments of your library and to your recommendations.

If you’re a SoundUnwound library user already, you may have noticed a little brown bar creeping up from the bottom of the screen – that’s it!

Hover your pointer over it (to the left a bit) and the full player will pop up, showing you the full playlist as loaded. If your library is sorted by ‘recently added’ the player will have queued up three tracks from your last 18 added releases. If it’s sorted by ‘release date’ it will have queued three tracks from your earliest 18 releases, and so on. If you narrow the bars on the timeline, you can queue up a particular selection: look at the new description (“From 1986 to 1990 you have 32 releases…”) and click ‘Play them’.

It’s also an easy way to listen to the ‘Recommendations based on your library’ and ‘Recent releases from artists in your library’ boxes – simply select ‘Play them’ and the available samples will queue up in your sample listener.

 

(Remember, we can only provide audio samples from releases which are available from Amazon MP3 and have a corresponding ASIN on the release page. )

Discovering new music usually requires exploration into the unknown, traveling in new directions to find sounds and artists you’ve never heard before. So if you’re not quite ready to put a brand new discovery in your library, we’ve created a ‘Remembered’ area which lets you quickly and easily mark albums for future investigation.  See an interesting release on an artist’s discography or hear something you like while playing the quiz? You can ‘Remember this’ album from any release’s blue drop-down menu and we’ll keep it for you, for later perusal, without having it affect your recommendations or new releases. You can access your ‘Remembered’ area using the tab at the top-right of your library page.  

Feel free to try it out and let us know what you think because this is a feature we’ll develop further in the future; or if you have any other comments, please let us know!

Ed @ SoundUnwound

News, You and New For You

It's been a busy week at SoundUnwound HQ, because we've made a few little changes to the website that we hope you’ll like.

In The News

Every day our moderators write news stories for the front page, but after a few days they just vanish and are never seen again! Until now: we’ve created a new section on artist pages, right at the bottom, called In The News. For example, we posted about AC/DC finally winning a Grammy: you can see that story, along with their previous entries, on the AC/DC page now.

User Profiles

We’ve created new profile pages for users, which collect summarized information about your library, your quiz scores and your edits on to one page (your library summary is not viewable by other users, but we may change that in the future). We’re not planning on turning into Facebook any time soon, but we do have ideas to develop these pages further.

New Release Notifications

The ‘my library’ feature is for more than just organizing the music you already know about; it’s for discovering new music you don’t know about too! That’s why we give you recommendations based on your library, and show you new releases by artists already in your library. Now, when an artist you’re already a fan of releases new music, we’d like to send you an e-mail to let you know! If you don’t already have a library set up, now’s a good time to start!

By the way, we won’t send more than one e-mail a week, and you can opt-out of receiving them at all through the ‘my settings’ link next to the ‘my library’ one.

We’ve got more exciting developments to tell you about too, but we’ll leave them for another time! As always, if you have any thoughts or feedback on these new features, please let us know!

Ed @ SoundUnwound

Fun & Games at SoundUnwound

After all the excitement of Christmas, we know that the new year can be a slow, dreary time. January sure feels like the longest month of the year, doesn’t it? That’s why we’ve launched our funnest feature yet – five fabulous SoundUnwound quizzes! 

We’ve made use of our vast library of 30-second samples to put together five genre quizzes which test your musical knowledge, and your reaction times. Do you think you know about pop, rock, indie, country and hip-hop? Can you tell the difference between Miley Cyrus and Demi Lovato? Pearl Jam and Soundgarden? Modest Mouse and the Manic Street Preachers? Toby Keith and Brad Paisley? Jay-Z and Ludacris?

Of course you can! But can you make your choice within a few short seconds, before you've heard their voices? The longer the clock ticks, the less points you win for answering correctly. We’ve already seen some users rack up impressive scores. Can you join them on the individual genre leader boards, or on the overall board?

And once you’ve mastered your own specialist subject, why not try the quiz of a genre you know less about? Everything you hear is shown with links to the main SoundUnwound site, so you can find out more about any new discoveries.

Warning: make sure you’ve already done your homework, washed the dishes and put the cat out, because these quizzes are addictive!

As always, if you’ve got any comments on the quizzes, please let us know by sending us feedback!

Ed @ SoundUnwound

My Library Gets Better

A couple months ago we sneaked a little link into the top-right row of your SoundUnwound screen -- ‘My library’-- which allows you to add all your music releases into one place, from where you can browse them, sort them in interesting ways, and receive recommendations. We always said we had bigger plans for this feature, so we’ve been busy improving that initial release.

 

Log into your library now and you’ll notice the new timeline, which uses bar graphs to show you how your library looks over time: which are your favorite and least-favorite years and periods?

While the timeline is in its default position, everything is included in the main viewing window, and when sorted by release date our new orange bookmarks divide everything by decade.

You can adjust the frame of the timeline by dragging the blue tabs at either end, narrowing down what you view to a smaller period.

 

If you’re still sorting by release date, the bookmarks change to show you releases by year, instead of by decade. The bookmarks will help you navigate through larger libraries, and they also show you some stats too. Which are your favorite artists and genres across different periods of your library?

Also, we’ve now made it possible for all your music purchases from Amazon.com to be automatically added to your SoundUnwound library. To activate the automatic import, select ‘Import from Amazon.com’ (which only shows when you have something to import) and tick the box.

So, whether you’ve signed up to SoundUnwound or not, why not try it out now? We have lots more plans for developing this feature even further, but if you have any comments or ideas, please let us know!

 

Ed @ SoundUnwound

SoundUnwound Editors' Awards

Every week it seems there’s another awards show handing out special prizes to pop stars and rock bands. At SoundUnwound, we thought it was about time we gave some awards to our top editors. So we’ve borrowed the concept of platinum, gold and silver discs, which are given to artists who sell a certain number of records, to honor SoundUnwound users who contribute a certain number of edits. You can see how it works on our About Editing page: 1,000 edits earns you a Bronze disc; 5,000 edits wins a Sapphire disc; 10,000 edits earns Ruby; 25,000 deserves Gold; and 100,000 edits is worthy of our highest award -- the Platinum disc.

We’re still working on getting the red carpet ceremony arranged ;-) In the meantime, these awards are just our little way to say thanks.

We’ve also made it easier for you to share our homepage news stories with friends, with buttons to share them on Twitter, Facebook and Digg. Don’t forget, you can keep up to date with all the music news and more through our own Twitter feed @soundunwound.

Finally, we’ve been improving our new ‘my library’ feature, with better recommendation widgets and faster, smoother navigation. But there’s a lot more to come there, so we’ll explain further in an upcoming blog post.

As ever, please let us know if you have any comments on our new features, or improvements you’d like to see.

Ed @ SoundUnwound

Search SoundUwound from your Firefox toolbar!

We have to thank Top 10 editor will bfree for developing a SoundUnwound-related Firefox plug-in! If you want to search SoundUnwound’s music database, wherever you are on the web, you can download Will’s plug-in from Mozilla’s official plug-ins library. It places our search engine into your Firefox toolbar, so you can find SoundUnwound info wherever you are!

Thanks again to Will for taking the time to develop this, we owe you one!

Team SoundUnwound

Gone Fishin'

Update: Sorry for the longer than usual interruption today, but we've been laying down the foundation bricks for a major new SoundUnwound feature – ‘My library’! You'll notice it first at the top-right of your screen (beside ‘My settings’), and you'll notice related buttons throughout the site too.

Suffice to say we've got big plans for this feature, so this is only the beginning!

Team SoundUnwound

SoundUnwound on Twitter!

SoundUnwound is now on Twitter! We held out for a while, but we finally caught the bug only several months after the whole rest of the world!

We'll post when there's more news up on our homepage, so stay tuned to keep in touch with the biggest (and funniest) news from the music world. Also, we often find interesting things just browsing our own website, so we'll post those too. For example, on Friday when we noticed a Russian gothic rock band that was named after English detective novelist Agatha Christie, we just had to tell someone: so that became our first tweet! We'll also tweet about site updates, if there's any problems, or if we have any exciting new features to highlight.

Find us at www.twitter.com/soundunwound

More Consistent Look and Feel

Hi there,

As many of you will have realized, we've recently changed a number of the pages on the site, so we wanted to provide a bit more info on this change.   

On the back of our new look for artist pages (which we hope you've been enjoying), we've tried to bring the other pages around the site into line with this new look and have therefore made a few visual changes, moving images to the top-left and putting crucial information front and center.  We feel this consistency in styling will make it a lot easier to navigate the site and quickly find the information you're looking for. It should now take you no time at all to locate the 1986 Rough Trade version of The Smiths' The Queen is Dead!

The best way to get a feel for the changes we've made is to pop over to your favorite release and have a look. Check out how the changes look on our genre pages too and why not use the MP3 player to sample the top tracks while you're there. A little IDM anyone?

If you're editing our site, you will hopefully be happy to see that we've made edit mode look more like read mode.  That means you get all the benefits of our new look in edit mode and the information should be easier to locate.  Same functionality. Same interaction.  Just a better spot!  

Anyway, I've spouted enough words about a visual experience!  Just search for your favorite artist or song and you'll see what we’re talking about.  Have fun on the site and, as always, drop us a line if you have any thoughts or comments.  

That's it from us.  We're off to design and develop whizzy new features for the site - you know they always have to be "whizzy"!  

Until then,

Team SoundUnwound