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
