29 replies to this topic

[haste]

jj, on 16 November 2012 - 10:47 AM, said:

When I search for "the nine" I get this result:

We couldn't find anything that matched that term. Please try again

Yup, I'd seen that. Was reported in this thread

http://rolldabeats.c...showtopic=57888

I'm looking at why this is happening. Not totally worked out what's going on as yet

[Cob]

I think Wickedpygmy makes a very good point about the quality of the database being diminished by amateur releases

Just being available to commercially download on Juno and Chemical does not qualify a release as a genuine release, both sites allow amateur producers to sell mp3

[haste]

I totally agree that I don't want the database to become overrun with a load of old crap and fully realise that there is a lot more going in now than there was before. I don't know much about these tunes so am not able to make a call on whether it deserves a spot in the database or not and seeing as most of the updates to this site are being moderated by me (at least in the first instance) then that makes this a tough thing to judge.

I want RDB to expand and cover more genres. D&B etc. is great but there is far less of it being released now (on vinyl anyway) and personally speaking the newer stuff I buy is all digital and mainly house music so I'm keen to broaden the scope of the site. The new layout changes that I've touched on above have been done to try and help the problem (one that I have on Discogs a lot) that finding stuff you were looking for can be tricky when there are lots of results. Over time I hope to improve the search even more so that you can filter by genres, years and all that stuff but we're a little while off that.

Potentially I could start including genres in search results for tracks? This could help things a lot, right? I personally don't have an issue with there being lots of results as long as you can find what you're looking for and everything is laid out in a way that doesn't spoil the user experience.

As it stands we take a feed from Juno and Juno Download for all their new D&B, Bass, Dubstep and UK Garage releases and you can see these going in on a daily basis. It looks to me that there are a lot of Dubstep releases going in, whether they're any good or not I have no idea. The time needed for the upkeep of this site from me is huge. Forgetting all the development and design work (there is a lot of that!) doing the updates is several hours of work a week and that's just from an automatic feed. If I had to go through the listings every day and hand pick the ones that I thought belonged in the database this would take up too much time and, as noted above, I don't know much about many of these genres so am not the right person to be doing this anyway.

I'd welcome any discussion of this or any suggestions that people had for a better solution.

The nine problem noted above is now fixed, by the way

[wickedpygmy]

Big decisions eh?

rdb collected info on vinyl releases. on the one hand, vinyl sales are ending, but music releases are tending to infinity.

Historically every single release has probably been handpicked, by adding the contents of many, many people's vinyl collections and requests, every single tune in the db had been bought or heard by at least one site user.

Do you want lots of releases coming in automatically from juno? If it were possible to see how many views a particular release or artist has had, you've probably got hordes of dead flotsam growing in your db...

If you want to expand into other genres, I would probably say that you need more moderators. Especially if there's currently a lot of releases going in that no-one on the site knows anything about. Of course, I'm sure it's not that straightforward to find another enthusiastic, trustworthy mod, but I can't imagine you are very excited by the prospect of spending an ever increasing amount of time pondering over tunes that you care less and less about......

perhaps in the absence of a mod, you need to use someother reference as a guide to the significance of a tune, perhaps only add tunes which appear in the top half of the juno weekly chart? You really don't need to be that thorough, the user community should pick up any obscure outliers that have got missed off??

[haste]

A well-timed reply.

I've just this afternoon put in a new way of importing releases which does not automatically add everything. It was definitely becoming a problem with all the nonsense releases so from now on anything coming in from third party sources goes into a queue and is moderated. Pretty much every vinyl release will still go in but we will only add digital releases that meet certain standards.

If we just stuck to vinyl then the site would soon become just a collection of ageing data!

wickedpygmy, on 30 November 2012 - 07:20 PM, said:

Historically every single release has probably been handpicked, by adding the contents of many, many people's vinyl collections and requests, every single tune in the db had been bought or heard by at least one site user.

Actually most of the additions to the database have come from weekly listings from online shops (mainly Juno, but also a few others) and have just been entered by hand with very little care to the quality of them. However, these were all physical releases so the digital realm (which absolutely needs to be included) present a far greater challenge. Very little is really to do with people's collections, to be honest. The submissions on the forum have always made up a very small sub-set of the additions to the site.

wickedpygmy, on 30 November 2012 - 07:20 PM, said:

If you want to expand into other genres, I would probably say that you need more moderators. Especially if there's currently a lot of releases going in that no-one on the site knows anything about. Of course, I'm sure it's not that straightforward to find another enthusiastic, trustworthy mod, but I can't imagine you are very excited by the prospect of spending an ever increasing amount of time pondering over tunes that you care less and less about......

We definitely do need more mods and that's something that I want to try and find. I think the guys who currently do look through all the queued releases know enough about current music to make at least an educated guess but the shear number of them will cause a problem. We are also all old so don't have that much time to do all of this!

[wickedpygmy]

after some thought i think i agree that it shouldn't matter too much what is in the database (it is going to keep groing regardless) providing the user can find what they are looking for..... how are search results ranked/ordered?

[wickedpygmy]

haste, on 30 November 2012 - 07:47 PM, said:

We definitely do need more mods and that's something that I want to try and find. I think the guys who currently do look through all the queued releases know enough about current music to make at least an educated guess but the shear number of them will cause a problem. We are also all old so don't have that much time to do all of this!

aye, you must've been doing this for 10 years. Maybe you can get your kids obsessed with dance music and have them take over?

[haste]

Been about that long. Kids? You think I have time for that?

[wickedpygmy]

heheh. well, im sure by the time it happens, they will have absolutely no interest in d&b or house anyways...

well, keep up the good work. maybe if releases are semi-automatically loaded from the juno chart, and search results are prioritised based on how well connected they in the db to other artists, labels, releases... starts to sound a bit like google.... who knows, maybe it will scale perfectly after all.

time to go and watch John B play another typically weird set, maybe I'll submit the "Electro & Bass" genre for you in the morning...

[internetrecordings]

excluding all free labels because some of them release shit tunes is a joke.

some vinyl labels release shit tunes.