New Features Released: Total Genre and Filter Control, New “Featured” Look

We're very excited to announce that no longer do you have to send over a request for us to update any of the items or values in your track filter modules on the left side of all track list pages. We just finished a tool that will give you total control over that. To sum it up as simply as possible, you can filter by any field in your metadata and all underlying values will update automatically when you make any metadata or naming changes. Here's how it works:

The Fields Editor

To access the Fields Editor, go to Manage Metadata > Fields. This page will display each filter set you have on your site. In this editor you can change the name/spelling of your filter values, add new values, or remove existing values. On the front-end when you're editing these values on tracks you'll be selecting from a drop-down that contains all of these values. With the drop-down you can assign multiple genres/categories to each track which solves a constraint some of our library partners had in the past. So, no longer do you have to come to us when you want a genre renamed, removed or added!

Controlling how your filters display

This one is really cool. Go to Edit Site Settings > Filters to access this new tool. On the left you'll see nodes that represent every metadata field on your site. On the right you'll see your current filters. To make changes to the order in which they're displayed or to add/remove items from your filters sets, just drag and drop. It's that easy. Also, you can nudge sub-categories for nodes over to the right, nesting it under its primary category. So for those of you who have categories and sub-categories, this little feature is for you. Now the power is in your hands to control the specific order in which you want to display your filters from top to bottom!

For our aggregators - the genre mapping tool

This won't apply to everyone, but for our aggregator partners this is a great new tool. As you aggregators know, the genres on your music's source site might not always match up with the genres you have on your own site. So, we created a tool that allows you to map the source genres to your own genre. For example, if the source site has the genre "Rock/Pop" in their metadata but you have just "Rock" on your site, you can now point all "Rock/Pop" genres to "Rock" on your own site and all of the music will fall nicely into your own genre. Just go to Manage Metadata > Mapping to make these updates.

New "Featured" track, album, artist, and label display

Up until now you've had the ability to feature items on the site but those featured items weren't necessarily apparent to the user. So, we've responded to a ton of requests and you will now notice that all featured tracks, albums, labels, artists, and composers will have a slight background color change to visually distinguish it from other items on the page. Featured tracks in the wave view will also say "Featured" as part of this update. One thing to note here - we understand the gold medal wasn't the best icon to use for featuring so we changed the featuring icon to a star. Click the star to feature and un-feature from here forward. That's it for now. As always, much more to come soon!