roncli.com blog: More on the TiS Beta

Some random tid bits from the last week on the Trax in Space beta.

First of all, Saurin and Ryan have done a fantastic job of making themselves available when it comes to listening to suggestions and bug reports. For the most part I've been filling in the feedback box that's on most pages, but for the occasional major bug, or perhaps an annoying bug I found while talking to one of them, they usually have it fixed in a jiffy.

You may have noticed the song previews load faster, but are of lower quality. After messing around with a few different types of files, they finally settled on song previews to be 64kbps bitrate and 44.1KHz sample rate. This is good, because now people on lower connections can listen to playlists, and the bandwidth draw from TiS won't be so bad.

Saurin has been working on the reviewer credibility system. It's very complex, and I'm not exactly sure what it is used for right now. Saurin has some plans for it, I know that much, so go ahead and give feedback on reviews, showing whether you agree or disagree with it.

The site has been remarkably stable and fast. I remember the old Trax in Space used to have a lot of problems, but that was largely because it was coded by amateur coders in ASP who hadn't the first clue on how to make it perform well. Yes, that was me back in 2000.

The site is also closing in rapidly on 300 songs in a week and a half, so it has already surpassed OSMusic.Net in terms of number of songs. Of course, Trax in Space has a solid brand name, and OSMusic's just a fledgling side site for the moment. Still, it's pretty amazing the draw it's getting. I told Ryan 1000 songs by the end of July. My estimate now appears conservative.

Beta keys are flowing. If you haven't gotten one yet, hook up with someone who is an artist on the site and ask them for an invitation, every artist gets 5 invites for the beta period.

I'm told new big features are around the corner that will make the site even more fun. After what I've seen for the first week and a half, I can't wait.

Labels: Trax in Space

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