I had to work on RR 2.0 a little yesterday, wasn't up for any serious work I have started to integrate user functionalities now. Most of the time was spent on figuring out how phpBB3 works, but now I get it totally. I can now list online users (even on every page so we can see where everybody is), I hope this will be a very cool and fun thing for you all! Also started to work on how to separate content from logged in users and plain visitors. Membership will be "awarded" being logged in should be the thing do in RR 2.0. I've also worked with new tuning-in-buttons so that I more easily can work with the relay servers. The current setup involves me uploading files using FTP every time. This is horrible The first incarnation of the webshop is also already working. Flash slideshow on front page working Copied most of the pages Hall of fame is working etc etc I think I'll focus on getting most things looking alright and working. Then I'll add all the nice features as time goes by. Getting it all finished before launch will take years What do you think?

Lord Elrond, you know that some members here are computer programmers and other computer Wizards and I know they will help you. Me just waiting for all the wonderful hard work is done and keep on enjoying all the fun around here. Even had James sign in to keep his membership active. He is busy with school and yes going into The National Guard here after he finishes school. This site keeps getting better and better! With all the experts as members I am sure they will help you get this site up where you want it to be in less time. I beleive many have all ready offered to help.

This sounds fantastic! Are you planning on having a Beta release for folks to help you test?

Yes, there is a beta, but it's not very far gone so far, but it works with the forum and the normal pages, but it's a bit too low-tech just yet. I would get too many comments Next thing to fix would be the "Now playing"-box to work. I will work to improve that one too. Will probably use AJAX and be smoother when rating. Oh, and one thing... what do you think of scrapping the album vote? I'd perhaps rather calculate that one from the rating of the tracks. Any ideas? Though I really like to give an album full score even if some tracks suck. There would be less things to vote on if we chose this approach Thoughts?

Actually, now that you mention it, I think that's a fantastic way to rate the albums (let the average from all the songs' ratings be the album rating). I think the one caveat would be that when you do your purging of low rated songs, that you don't delete the entire album unless all the songs have one or two stars (or whatever you decide is the criteria)...

Oh, I've thought of a probable solution to the problem with all the time needed to enter all data for the new music... what if I just let it be filled by the community in a wiki-sort-of-way? Say for example that the Now Playing-box says "Ilan Eshkeri - Coronation (track 20, from Stardust)" or similar, and all users participating entering biography, adding image to Ilan's profile page, adding the album artwork, track names, links to official site, Amazon ASIN etc. If we all help out it won't be that time consuming. And best of all.. You will be awarded and rise in the ranks of the new Radio Rivendell 2.0, unlocking more and more goodies Any thoughts? I think this will be a good way to start out. It will be much quicker for new music instead of me having to manually enter all the information before adding the music.

Oh,.. and when we're at it... what would you like the format in the player (Winamp, iTunes, Media Player, etc etc) be? Perhaps something like this? "Coronation - Startdust by Ilan Eshkeri (2007)" I'd like the following to be part of the string: Track name, album name (finally!), composer, year, tracknumer (do we need this?) Thoughts, ideas?

I would do Song - Composer - Album (YEAR) but Song - Album - Composer (YEAR) works too.

Yup, I think it's any of those two, unless someone has a better choice?

I personally like Hawkins' suggestion of "Song - Composer - Album (YEAR)". Then at least the song title and Album name are separated. I sometimes get easily confused by which is which on some sites/players. It would also be slick for the first time visitors to have the format documented that near the listing.

I personally like Hawkins' suggestion of "Song - Composer - Album (YEAR)". Then at least the song title and Album name are separated. I sometimes get easily confused by which is which on some sites/players. It would also be slick for the first time visitors to have the format documented that near the listing. That is why I suggested the first arrangement. I just wasn't able to quite find the words to describe why. Thank you Sir Dan!

One thing we could use is the format with "by" and "from" in the string so it's not possible to mixup "Songtitle by Artist from Album (200"

Ooooh! That'd work!

I concur! Hey, will we be getting more emoticons for RR 2.0?

Yes! All I need to know is where to find and how to install them You can start searching for "emoticons for phpBB3" and post your results here The default ones are kind of sucky

Yes! All I need to know is where to find and how to install them You can start searching for "emoticons for phpBB3" and post your results here The default ones are kind of sucky Little do you know the floodgate you just opened! MWAAA HAA HAA HAAAAAAA I'll post a few thousand of my recommendations here later. http://fc65.deviantart.com/fs5/i/2004/344/c/1/Evil_______by_parablivion.gif

Haha, great! I have no idea how this will work out or how to install them. Hopefully it can be automated somehow. Sounds like it will take some time adding thousands?

An idea grows... I have been looking into automating the track import into the database. That's the thing that has caused a delay in new tracks and stuff been missing from the database for quite some time. It all had to be entered manually and that was a horrible task to take care of. I'm now looking into building a script that can take huge lists of tags ripped from the MP3s and enter them into the database. I've more or less just started, so it will be a while longer. I think I will let RR 2.0 wait for this feature. I think I also need to rebuild the database structure, it was built by a not so very smart guy (no names )) and I have a thought on dropping all the old, and rebuild it from scratch... Hmm... but that is quite out of the question... since then we'd lose everything. Hmm.. Crap. Didn't think of that. I think I'll build a new database and then build an script to import all old data. We wouldn't want to lose all ratings, and all information already entered.. That's suck big time!

Hooray! Great progress today! I've created a script that takes all tags from mp3 and checks if they are existing in the database and if not enter them automatically. In my first testrun I created 25 artists, 11 albums and 132 songs in roughly one second! A BIT quicker than the manual work of 20 seconds per track I'm really excited! What remains to be fixed is how all our old data can be imported/converted... Will look into that shortly.

That's wonderful! I know that manual MP3 tagging is a pain. What a clever elf you are! Speaking of...you asked earlier for emoticon suggestions: http://msnsmileys.net/l/Lord_Of_The_Rings/