AmigaRemix.com fully revamped... Finally!

[Ziphoid]

So, there we go, not a decade too soon. The new version of www.amigaremix.com has now been launched to the public. I do need everyone's help to give it a spin to see that it works as intended, so please go onto the site and do your worst!

All comments are appreciated, also negative ones, as long as they are followed with some constructive feedback.

[C64GLeN]

Fantastic stuff!

[Monty]

Great work, Ziphoid! I really like the idea and execution. One can see by the attention to detail that a lot of passion has been put into it.

Some first observations regarding the playback functionality - there now seem to be 3 options to actually play a song:
(1) click on the song's info badge
(2) click on the song name
(3) click on the smiley and the R64 dialog pops up.

(1) and (2) are basically the same with (1) having the player embedded and (2) popping up a playback window.
Differences between (1) and (2) are that (1) has a waveform zoom slider that (2) has not and (2) starts the song automatically while (1) does not.

However, at the moment I would probably still choose option (3), because
- it has a volume slider
- song starts more or less instantly (loads up during playback) while with option (1) and (2) the song seems to be pre-loaded which takes ~75 sec for a 10 MiB file. I would turn to other things while the song pre-loads, instantly forget about it and get a heart attack when the song suddenly starts (on full volume)

Cheers, Monty

[LaLa]

Awesome work, Ziphoid! Just in time for the site's upcoming 20th anniversary!

[Ziphoid]

Great work, Ziphoid! I really like the idea and execution. One can see by the attention to detail that a lot of passion has been put into it.

Thanx! Indeed I've spent a lot of time fine-tuning all sorts of tiny things, which can be shown when digging deeper into the well of things... As I mention in the news item (which in itself also contains a small easter egg if you're somewhat familiar with my Amiga history ), the site really is an iceberg in the sense of what's shown on the frontend is just a small piece of it. The whole backend engine is completely rewritten as well and has a lot of functionality to make it all work out.

Some first observations regarding the playback functionality - there now seem to be 3 options to actually play a song:
(1) click on the song's info badge
(2) click on the song name
(3) click on the smiley and the R64 dialog pops up.

Quite correct, indeed. To be honest, the site is made for "professional" users, meaning that once you get the hang of how it works, it takes quite a lot of things for granted of how you should use it. The info badge link is mostly there to give every remix its own "home" as a permalink. Since that's the landing spot you'll most probably arrive at if the link has been shared anywhere, or even searched for, I decided to to make sure it doesn't autoplay. The popup is mostly there to give a quick way of playing the track without going to another page. Also, the waveform display is just a fun way of displaying the track (with yet another hidden meaning in the colour of the waveform). It can be quite frustrating if you are on a low-bandwidth connection, though. However, there's a solution for this and it's to change the player to be audio only, as explained in the FAQ. You can do that on the options page and it'll be stored in a cookie.

All these things are definitely open for tweaking and this is why I need your feedback, so keep it coming if you find something else that is a bit odd.

[Monty]

However, there's a solution for this and it's to change the player to be audio only, as explained in the FAQ. You can do that on the options page and it'll be stored in a cookie.

Ahhh, thanks for pointing this out, it's perfect now! Even the volume slider returns

Excellent!

[LaLa]

Ziphoid,

A small bug to report:

When I hover over the "Charts" menu item, the tooltip appears. Then I click on "Charts" and it opens the R64 chart in a new tab. So far so good. Now I close the R64 tab, and I'm back at AmigaRemix.com - and the tooltip remains on screen, even when I hover over the "Forum" and its tooltip comes up. Very small bug, just a bit annoying visually. (All this on Firefox, BTW, if that makes any difference.)


Also, to be honest, I'm not a big fan of the new logo. I'm all for ASCII art, and this one is a clever one - but maybe too clever. I usually have no trouble reading ASCII art text when I squint, but this one I would've had trouble deciphering if I didn't know it was supposed to say "Amiga Remix". (Especially the "GA" and the "RE" parts look hard to read for me.) Maybe I am just getting too old for this stuff?

[Ziphoid]

Ziphoid,

A small bug to report:

When I hover over the "Charts" menu item, the tooltip appears. Then I click on "Charts" and it opens the R64 chart in a new tab. So far so good. Now I close the R64 tab, and I'm back at AmigaRemix.com - and the tooltip remains on screen, even when I hover over the "Forum" and its tooltip comes up. Very small bug, just a bit annoying visually. (All this on Firefox, BTW, if that makes any difference.)

Yes, I've noticed this one but have just postponed it to get the site out the door. I'll add a ticket to fix it.

Also, to be honest, I'm not a big fan of the new logo. I'm all for ASCII art, and this one is a clever one - but maybe too clever. I usually have no trouble reading ASCII art text when I squint, but this one I would've had trouble deciphering if I didn't know it was supposed to say "Amiga Remix". (Especially the "GA" and the "RE" parts look hard to read for me.) Maybe I am just getting too old for this stuff?

Well, there's a solution to this, of course. Just go to the options page and choose to hide it.

I can understand that there are occasional problems reading these kinds of logos but this one is created by an esteemed demoscene ASCII artist and has been approved by the ASCII/ANSI community so I guess we'll just have to go with the "being too old"-answer for now.

[Ziphoid]

When I hover over the "Charts" menu item, the tooltip appears. Then I click on "Charts" and it opens the R64 chart in a new tab. So far so good. Now I close the R64 tab, and I'm back at AmigaRemix.com - and the tooltip remains on screen, even when I hover over the "Forum" and its tooltip comes up. Very small bug, just a bit annoying visually. (All this on Firefox, BTW, if that makes any difference.)

Should be solved now.

[LaLa]

When I hover over the "Charts" menu item, the tooltip appears. Then I click on "Charts" and it opens the R64 chart in a new tab. So far so good. Now I close the R64 tab, and I'm back at AmigaRemix.com - and the tooltip remains on screen, even when I hover over the "Forum" and its tooltip comes up. Very small bug, just a bit annoying visually. (All this on Firefox, BTW, if that makes any difference.)

Should be solved now.

That was fast! Thank you!

[LaLa]

[...] so I guess we'll just have to go with the "being too old"-answer for now.

<sigh> Seems to be the answer to many of my issues these days...

Well, there's a solution to this, of course. Just go to the options page and choose to hide it.

Man, you have an option for everything! Even for grumpy old people! Great!

[Ziphoid]

I've also just now released a new little feature to make it possible to binge-listen to the whole collection. Have a look at the FAQ for more details.

[LMan]

Amazing work Ziphoid!! Thanks for keeping the site alive!

[Ziphoid]

My pleasure! During the last few days, quite a few things have been implemented, mostly in the backend. However, if you like the new layout and look, but get a headache from the font, you can now choose to use the default system fonts instead but still keep all the new functionality in place.

Also, the binge-functionality has now been improved with updating the URL when a new track is playing, so a refresh of the page will stick on the currently playing track. In addition to this, search and sort values are now actually stored within the SITE_OPTIONS cookie, to make it more resilient on platforms such as iOS.

I'm currently walking through all the tracks from the beginning of AR to make sure that all details are correct. Whenever I've confirmed the proper details of all tracks during a year, a torrent-file will be generated containing all the tracks released during that year and then put into the archive.

More comments and ideas are appreciated, but I hope to stop development of new functionality shortly to move on to other projects. The rejuvenation of this has made it a _LOT_ easier to do new stuff as well as managing the submissions and details, so I'm sure things will be happening a lot smoother from now on.

[Analog-X64]

Very cool updates I'll have to spend some time and explore everything... Thanks for all the hard work.