Have you had problems uploading music to Aucadia?

If you've signed up as an artist but experienced problems uploading your music then you'll be pleased to hear we have upgraded our upload technology and you should now be able to upload your music without any problems. If you have any questions about this, please contact me at robin@aucadia.com (please don't just reply to this email as I wont receive anything).

New Player and Waveforms

If you've seen the site in the last week, you'll have noticed we've added a new music player. Click 'show playlist' to get the full-screen view. From here you can play, rearrange and search for music on Aucadia. Soon you will also be able to save and retrieve playlists and share them with other users. We will be developing and expanding the player features as time goes on.

From now on, when you upload a new track to Aucadia it automatically generates a unique waveform image that corresponds to your track. If you've already got music on Aucadia then don't bother uploading it again - these tracks will all be converted shortly. Users can click on the waveform image to navigation through your track. Go to Aucadia.com and have a look.

Looking to the Future

We've got lots of exciting features lined up to add to the site, for example very soon you will be able to enter time-sensitive comments on any track on Aucadia. This means that you will be able to leave a comment on a specific part of a track which will then pop up whenever someone else reaches that part of the track. Artists will soon be able to see for themselves which parts of their track are most popular with their fans.

We're keen to get as much music as possible on Aucadia before preparing to make the jump to real money and real investment. This is where you can help. If you know any great artists that are likely to be interested in trying something new and attracting new fans then please send them an email letting them know about Aucadia. The more diversity of talent we have, the stronger our community will be.

As always, if you find any bugs or have any suggestions either email me, or send me some feedback through the site. I'm always looking for fresh ideas.

Thanks to everyone who has helped out and uploaded music so far,

Robin

Gearing up to release our cool new player. Watch this space.

A spam bot seems to have crawled into this shady corner of the internet and started spamming our feedback box. To remedy this I've had to add a CAPTCHA (spam bot test). Don't be put off sending feedback, all you've got to do is enter the two words that show up after entering your message.

Robin

Hi everyone.

Just a quick post to let everyone know what's going on behind the scenes. As some of you have realised we are currently unearthing some trading bugs which cause incorrect values to be displayed on your portfolio. Rest assured, we are fixing these and your portfolio should be back to normal in the next couple of days. Please don't stop trading or listening to tracks, the best way to find the root cause is to try things out.

A huge thank you to all our beta testers.

Robin

As of the latest update, users can award each other karma points. Karma points are a way of rewarding the users whom you think are most active in the community. But beware the double-edged sword, users can also decrease Karma if you do something they don't approve of. You need to be logged in to change another user's karma and karma is anonymous, so don't hesitate to let other users know how you feel.

One of the reasons I'm such a big fan of the music site Last.fm is the track-logging features they've got. I like them so much, I had to implement a similar thing here on Aucadia.com. If you look on your profile you'll now see automatically-generated playlists containing things like your most-listened tracks and favourite playlists. You can also check out other users' profiles to see what they've been listening to.

You'll be pleased to hear that the signup system is now bug-free and the track upload bugs have also been shown the door. We should now be able to expand our artist base a little. If you know of any artists that might be interested in signing up and having a go then we'd be very grateful if you could send them a link. The more observant amongst you will also notice some strange circles on the little artist blocks on the front page. These are there as a preview of the user medals that will be coming soon. Users will be awarded medals for meeting certain criteria. Stay tuned to find out when this feature is finished.

I'd like to personally thank everyone for submitting bug reports and feedback. You're helping make the site much more solid and making my job easier. If you've got any thoughts about the latest update, please tell us what you think.

Robin

As if further proof were needed of the record industry’s backward approach to internet distribution, news that Warner Music – one of the ‘Big Four’ major labels – has decided to withdraw its catalogue from online streaming services has filtered across the Atlantic today.

Obviously this will come as a major blow to the ambitions of services like Spotify, We7 and Last.fm, but it shouldn’t be a massive surprise. Industry-watchers have long questioned the ability of free streaming services to take on the established business model, with nagging doubts remaining over the payments of royalties and the size of advertising revenues. Losing a roster that includes the likes of Death Cab For Cutie, R.E.M and Jay-Z is hardly likely convine such naysayers, and it could yet get worse for Spotify-lovers, if rumours of a merger with EMI prove well-founded.

However the (multi-)million pound question is: where does this leave us, the music fans? Warner clearly hopes that we will all forget that services such as Spotify exist, and that we will all instead go back to buying CDs, or better still, vinyl. But given the tech-savvy crowd that have become the early adopters of Spotify, it’s much more likely that we’ll see a spike in Jay-Z torrents, which may herald a return to the bad-old-days of labels prosecuting their fan-base. In the strange world that record labels execs inhabit – no doubt located somewhere between Cloud Cuckoo Land and Never, Never Land (where CDs never grow old) – it’s almost as if the last decade hasn’t happened.

We like to think that over here at Aucadia.com we have a thing or two to add to the grand Future Of Music debate, and this action by Warner highlights many of our music industry pet hates. Firstly, it displays a contempt for music fans, the very people that have propped up their industry for decades. The internet has fundamentally changed the way people access and connect with music: it’s offered them the ability to broaden their tastes, share new music with friends and communicate directly with the people that make it. Warner seems to want to limit access to music, crush sharing and keep fans merely as consumers, and that really gets our goat. We obviously think Aucadia offers artists and fans a better way create, distribute and share music – better than Spotify, We7 or Last.fm, as it happens - but we also want to see music fans offered a real choice in the way they listen to music, and that’s why we’re disappointed to hear of Warner’s backward-looking decision.

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Another quick site update: we’re putting the finishing touches to release v0.7, which will feature the complete artist functionality, meaning we’ll be throwing open our doors to artist registration very shortly. Watch this space!

Owen

As Owen mentioned in his last post, last night we pushed out an update that includes lots of exciting new features for you to try out.

Users can now save, load and share playlists they've created and browse other playlists on the 'listen' page. To save a playlists you've made click on "show playlist options" below the volume bar and then enter a name for your playlist. Your saved playlists will be accessible by clicking the "Playlists" tab on your profile or by following the "My Playlists" link on your user menu. To load any playlist just choose the track you'd like to start with and press play. Each playlist has its own page with comments and information. Along with user playlists there are also auto playlists on some pages such as the two on the homepage and each user now has a 'recently played' playlist showing their listening habits (it's a good thing the Spice Girls aren't on Aucadia or my credibility would take a terrible hit).

Also, artists and users now have prettier URLs to show off with. Artist URLs follow the format http://www.aucadia.com/artist_name and user URLs look like http://www.aucadia.com/users/username.

You'll also notice that the user menu has had an overhaul. Instead of the old menu links you've now got a drop-down user box that includes links to the most commonly used features.

As if all this wasn't enough, and after a long period in exile, the personal message system has made a triumphant return. You'll find your inbox listed in the new user links.

That's all for now. As usual if you find any bugs or have any suggestions please contact us using the feedback form on the site. Next week you can look forward to a karma system revamp and go tagging crazy with the new tag system.

Robin