Twilight Sparkle ✨

1) Pony.fm is strictly limited to MLP fan music. Even if you make non-pony music, Pony.fm isn't the place for it. Much of the site's strength will be founded on its exclusivity to pony tunes, so it just isn't the right place to be uploading non-pony work.
 
2) To be honest, I actually haven't thought much about this one. I think it's worth opening a wider discussion about the subject of covers. While I'd like the focus of Pony.fm to remain on remixes and original tracks, the true goal of the site is to be the brony music scene's one-stop outlet, and covers are definitely a huge part of the scene.
 
The exact definition of what constitutes a "cover" is blurry, too... for example, DusK has made a number of tracks like this one which he refers to as "metal covers," but are quite heavily reworked:
 
https://pony.fm/tracks/73-babs-seed-metal-cover
 
The idea of adding a taxonomy for covers came up once, but we never reached an outcome on whether there should be a distinction between covers and remixes because we couldn't reach a conclusion on the definition of either.
 
https://pony.fm/tracks/226-celestias-ballad-cover
 
With all that said and done, I think well-made covers, like this one ^, definitely have a place on Pony.fm. While they aren't fan music, strictly speaking, they're definitely pony, and there's definitely an audience for them.

This has been added. Genres beside a track are now clickable.
 
https://pony.fm/genres
 
As usual, please start a new topic to voice any feedback on how the feature can be improved.

This was fixed in Alpha 2: http://mlpforums.com/tracdown/issue/100-dropdown-nav-menu-is-cut-off/

After mulling this over for a while, I think I can safely say that Pony.fm's tracks and albums will not be getting wiped. I will run through and clean out all obvious test tracks, but all other content will be left in place. So, feel free to start uploading to the site as if it was an archive.
 
The statistics may or may not be reset in the transition. More likely to be reset than not, for reasons already discussed above. This will primarily be a cosmetic thing, though, and will not functionally affect anything.

This is a planned feature: http://mlpforums.com/tracdown/issue/109-allow-a-new-version-of-a-track-to-be-uploaded/
 
There is not much good reason not to allow a track to be updated in the future. As it is something that I don't expect to happen all too often, though, it isn't a high development priority. If you need to upload a new version of a track in the meantime, just let me know and I'll be happy to replace the file on the server manually.

This is now a planned feature: http://mlpforums.com/tracdown/issue/105-waveforms/

1) I'll consider adding that. For the time being, tag "ponified" songs as original compositions. It's a great idea.
 
2) The restriction to PNG images is intentional. Just like the audio files, I'd also like to have lossless cover art available.
 
350x350 is the dimension minimum, not a maximum. Did you have trouble uploading a larger file? Please attach the exact image you weren't able to upload to Pony.fm to a reply to this thread, and I'll take a look at that.
 

 
 
 
This has been added.

Tracks on your profile will remain prearranged by a consistent algorithm across the entire site - most likely date, but possibly alphabetical at a later time. That's a place where users should know what to expect.
 
 
But this ^ is on its way. The final site will end up with playlists, albums, or a combination of both. Regardless, either feature will come with the ability to let you set the order of the tracks in the collection. It only makes sense, really.


I've added this task to the tracker: http://mlpforums.com/tracdown/issue/95-playlists/
 
Locking this topic as there's no question on whether this feature will happen or not.

@,@@Wolfy,
 
I'm happy to say that the "Follow User" feature made it in today!
 
As always, please start new topics to voice your feedback on it.

This is a bug: http://mlpforums.com/tracdown/issue/60-delete-album-button-does-not-work/
 
Albums should most definitely be possible to delete. Thanks for tracking down this rather nasty issue.


Update: This is now fixed.

Yep, there will be! I've added it to the tracker: http://mlpforums.com/tracdown/issue/87-report-button/
 
Am contemplating whether to give it a few reporting prefixes, like "stolen content", "inappropriate content", etc. Any suggestions?

Some people are complaining quite vocally about the "new" SoundCloud, but I can't help but agree that it feels incredibly smooth, at least as far as the core focus of the site - listening to music - is concerned. Being able to browse around freely without interrupting what's playing is quite awesome.
 
Thing is, it is only possible for SoundCloud to have this feature due to the way that the new version of the site is architected as a so-called "single-page application". That means that after the initial page load, your browser never grabs another page from the servers; instead, it asks the servers for the information it needs to, say, display a track, and then modifies the page you are looking at with the information it received. In other words, it functions a lot more like a desktop program than a traditional website with many pages.
 
Implementing the ability to listen to songs like that while browsing Pony.fm would require fundamentally rewriting the entire front-end from top to bottom to function as a single-page application, and that will require a significant investment of time to put together while accounting for browser quirks, memory issues, and so on (not to mention that I need to really brush up on my JavaScript to pull it off at all). I absolutely intend to do that someday to create a fluid experience, but it is a greater priority at this time to establish the core features and backend of the site. Once that's in a relatively stable form, I plan to look into rewriting the front-end as an SPA.

I didn't mean to imply that real-time notifications were impossible; only that pulling them off sanely would create a situation that requires extremely careful planning to work around. Key Gear did pull it off on MLP Forums, and its notification system is a great deal heavier (code-wise) than Pony.fm's.
 
I've noted this down in the tracker as something I'm going to investigate, because if a good solution is found, I will definitely try my best to implement it. Straight-up real-time notifications would be the simplest for the end user to understand.

I like the idea of having some kind of "album uploader" mechanism. Thanks for the detailed concept mockups, Anorax.
 
I've been thinking of implementing it somewhat differently, though, in a mechanism where you create the album first and then that album has its own uploader (ex: https://pony.fm/a542/upload). Every track uploaded using that album's uploader will be directly attached to that album.
 
The idea of granting a user control over which track is the "featured one" for the homepage sounds nice, but I don't think it's really necessary. Simply showing a user's last published track would be simpler and easier to understand. I'll consider adding some kind of visual differentiation for tracks that are part of an album, though; that should be quite doable and rather fun.

That is correct; music which is not My Little Pony fan music has no place on Pony.fm, regardless of whether it is made by a brony or not.
 

AAC has been added. The AAC files are encoded at 256 Kbps and turn out at roughly half the size of the 320 Kbps MP3's. At this time, they are not tagged with metadata. A separate algorithm needs to be written to tag them, unfortunately, which will take some time to do.
 
This issue appears to be present with playback in the browser. I'll be working on fixing that up. I'll leave streams set to MP3 in the meantime, to preserve correct playback behaviour.
 

 
Update: I've managed to correct the issue with AAC files not playing back correctly in the browser. Playback now functions as intended, so every single stream on Pony.fm has been replaced with an AAC one. Enjoy the faster loads and improved quality! This will be great for everyone who actually listens to music on Pony.fm.
 
As usual, if you experience any issues, please report them in the bug tracker.

I was actually planning to put the inline player on profile pages (so that a profile functions as if all the user's uploads are one big album, allowing continuous playback from one track to the next). Would that not be a smoother way to accomplish the same goal, which is to make it easy to listen to all of a user's tracks in order?

Notifications are absolutely coming to Pony.fm. In fact, I have been planning out how to implement them over the past few days and am beginning to code them tonight.
 
I don't like IP.Board's notification system all that much, though. The system I plan to build after will be much more akin to deviantART's in form and function.

If it's a FiM fan game, its soundtrack is fair game for Pony.fm. I understand you are putting your own renditions of the music together for the game, not uploading a straight rip of third-party soundtracks, right?
 
The general rule of thumb for Pony.fm is: if you had ponies in mind when writing a piece, it's probably pony fan music.

I trust you're familiar with the embedded player by now?
 
https://pony.fm/tracks/116-tales-of-equestria-whitetail-woods-theme-1st-edit
 
^ that thing?
 
Essentially, what I'm planning is to replace every track entry on an album page with an embedded version of the track's player. Think SoundCloud.
 
Edit: I'm closing this topic because this has been implemented.

The nature of the basic uploader (it's a simple HTML fileinput field) makes it impossible to get any indicator of the upload's progress, unfortunately.
 
Tracking the upload's progress necessitates a completely different data transfer mechanism that comes with either Flash, a mountain of JavaScript, or both - at any rate, it'll completely defeat the purpose of the basic uploader by adding almost all the moving parts that the "fancy" one has.
 
This is an inherent problem in the HTML spec, which provides virtually nothing to work with as far as file uploads are concerned. You can blame the people at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for it.

I just wrapped up a basic play counter. It will add one play to the count per completion of the song.
 
Currently, doing this also adds one download to the download count, because the site's player grabs the standard MP3 download. I'll add a secondary URL to access the MP3 that doesn't log a download to correct this.


Update: A "play" no longer adds a "download".


Update 2: I changed the "popular tracks" algorithm to retrieve tracks with the most plays in the past 24 hours. Prior, the metric used was views. You can see the results on the homepage and the Today's Top 20 page.

Nyeah.
 

 
How's this?

They're accurate.

I'm happy to report that this feature has been added!
 
https://mlpforums.com/blogs/entry/2263-embedding-ponyfm-tracks-on-mlp-forums-and-other-sites/