Looperman Just Got Better

It's been a long time coming but I'm pleased to finally announce a new batch of updates to looperman.com that I feel should make the whole experience much better. There is still a big list of things to be done and Ill try and release the updates in stages.

New audio player

The biggest part of this update is the new audio player. We moved away from the old flash player and replaced it with a HTML5 / javascript player with a flash option to fall back on. In a nutshell what this means is that anyone trying to use the site on an ipad, iphone or any other device that does not allow the use of flash can play and preview all the sounds. It should also speed up the time taken to load the pages. Fingers crossed the player should function fine across all browsers.

Visual Waveforms

Another huge part of this update is the way we now show a visual waveform of all the sounds. This waveform is auto generated when you upload and allows you to watch the track being played, skip to a chosen part of an acapella or see how accurate a loop is. When we show loops you'll also notice time markers that appear on the first, second and third beats. This makes it simple to see if a loop is on time and looping well to the beat.

Volume controls and time display

All sounds also now have their own volume controls bars and duration / play position timers

Copyright info

I added an icon to the bottom bar of each player that gives you information on copyright for the file in question. At the moment the message is pretty generic but it should help answer the question that many newer users ask regarding how each type of file can be used. Some people in the past have confused the terms for loops, acapellas and tracks. The terms and conditions page has also been updated to make things clearer.

Plays counter for tracks

Back by popular demand, each track player now counts the number of plays. Plays are only counted for logged in users, we dont count plays by the owner of the track and we only count a single play per day per user. This is to try and make the play count more relevant and harder to abuse. You can see a list of who played your track on the tracks detail page and you can see a list of the tracks you played via your profile tracks page.

Add to favourites for tracks

At the moment the favourites feature is only available for tracks. This feature may change in future but for now it is what it is. I added an icon to the bottom bar of the player that allows you to add or remove a track from your favourites. The favourites icon will show as active for any track you added to your favourites. You can see who added your track to their favourites on the tracks detail page and you can see the tracks you chose as your favourites via your profile tracks page.

Player stats counters

The stats for each item are now shown on the top right of each player. Depending on which type of player you are looking at you should see plays, favourites, downloads and comments. Clicking any of these should take you to the page where you can see more details of who did what.

Loops and acapella stats

Ill add more to this area in future but for now its just a simple way to see who uploaded the most files in each section. For loop uploads see http://www.looperman.com/loops/stats and for acapella uploads take a look at http://www.looperman.com/acapellas/stats. As with everything on looperman, its not a competition. Only upload stuff that is worth uploading rather then flooding the site with stuff just to climb higher in the list.

Featured tracks page

The featured tracks page update has been active for a few weeks but I thought I would mention it here too. The idea here is that those users who take time to comment on other users tracks get more exposure then those who dont. To have your track appear on the featured tracks page you have to do two things. Firstly you need to set one of your tracks to featured when you upload it or by editing it and then finally you have to comment on another users track. That's it, your track will now show on the featured tracks page for up to 48 hours. Tracks appear on the featured tracks page ordered by the date and time of the last comment made.

The standard tracks list is still the same and shows tracks listed in order of when they were uploaded.

Updated help area and terms pages

Another thing that should help cut down on obvious questions both in my Inbox and in the forums is the updated help area and terms and conditions pages. I split the help section down into smaller sections and added a few more common questions and answers. If you think of anything that should be added there let me know. The terms and conditions page has been updated too to make things clearer regards the use of loops, acapellas and tracks.

More updates to come

There is plenty more to come so for now just let me know how you are getting on with the recent updates and if you run into any problems get in touch and let me know what's wrong.

Let me know what you think

Dont forget to leave a comment and let me know what you think of the new features.